Artists Mike Cloud and Nyeema Morgan discuss ‘Story Structure, Pt. 2’, their exhibition at the Neubauer Collegium, reflecting on language, ambiguity, power, and the shifting ways stories shape how we understand ourselves and the world.
16 July 2026
Presented at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society in Chicago, ‘Story Structure, Pt. 2’ brought together the distinct yet deeply connected practices of artists Mike Cloud and Nyeema Morgan. While Morgan’s restrained, text-based works investigate framing, omission, and the politics of context, Cloud’s expansive paintings assemble a dense constellation of images, symbols, and references that resist fixed interpretation. Together, their work asks viewers to question not only what they see, but how meaning itself is constructed. Cloud and Morgan reflect on doubt as a creative force, the instability of language, the myths surrounding artistic identity, and why paying attention to the margins may offer new ways of imagining the present.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: ‘Story Structure, Pt. 2’ seems less concerned with giving viewers answers than with showing how meaning is made. Why is that important to both of you now?
Neema Morgan: I grew up in the U.S., very much aware of the contradictions between our social and political reality. Our current administration has brought that tension to the forefront for a larger part of the population. The stories we’re told that shape our identity no longer hold up as de facto truth. For better and/or worse, we carry so much uncertainty and a whole lot of distrust. Doubt is essential to progress, and as an artist, I work in a field that has the most radical potential to instigate doubt—cast inward and outward.
Mike Cloud:Art is a sensual experience—there is a negotiation between sensual certainty (what you see is what you see) and textual doubt. In storytelling, that happens when you introduce a narrator. The doubt that a narrator brings in is the sensual aspect of the story; the narrator is the source of ambiguity and doubt, even more so than the author. The untrustworthy narrator is the focus of meaning-making in this political and social moment.
Nyeema, your work often focuses on framing and what is left unsaid. Mike, your paintings bring together many images and references at once. What draws each of you to these ways of communicating?
NM: It’s all about position, perspective and relativity, which for me bears strong social significance. As a matter of survival, I was taught to be hyper-observant (and literate). To consider the context, subtext and paratext. That’s ‘why’ something is being said and done is equally as important as ‘what’ is being said or done. We respond to action; action is external; reason is internal— it’s hidden. I was that child fixated on the “why” and the “how” questions rather than the “what” questions, and I still am.
MC: My paintings are texts that have subtext and paratext of their own. There is subtext in the sources of the images and signs I combine and in my identity as an author. In painting, subtext and authorship help the audience understand, as Nyeema says, the “why” of the text. “Why” is the subject of painting. But the subject of a painting is not its meaning. That attracts me to the medium and to collage as a strategy. The subject is merely a pretext for the formal text itself.
Language plays a central role in this exhibition, but it often feels unstable or open-ended. What interests you about ambiguity, especially now, when people want clear answers and fixed meanings?
MC. Text and information aesthetics promise a literal meaning. Literal meaning is never as satisfying as I think it will be. So my work moves from the literal to the ambiguous; every sign signifies more than one thing at once. That is more satisfying and more reminiscent of life.
NM: The idea of clear answers and fixed meanings is illusory. Language is unstable. It’s unwieldy. I find solace in the ambiguity of language, in poetics. There’s space to play and experiment. I’d like to think I’m doing nothing more than reminding us of this instability.
Mike, your new paintings were inspired by New York Times search results for the word “sun.” What drew you to working from a search term, and what does that process reveal about how we find and understand information today?
MC: I have a nostalgic relationship to hierarchical models of knowledge and learning before the “feed” of social media and anonymous, citizen reportage. Newspapers once had a monopoly on authoritative reporting about important issues, but their digital forms are lost in a sea of equivalent content. My long, literal, sprawling URLs are aesthetic lifelines between ephemeral content and an accountable (citable) source.
Both of you have said you are interested in “social form” rather than “social truth.” What can art reveal when it focuses on how stories and beliefs are shaped, rather than proving what is true?
NM: There’s a great deal of politics tied to social truths. Political identity requires a fixed set of values. Although I’m deeply invested and interested in politics, I’m less interested in the power that’s contractually wielded or conceded between us because that shifts over time. Values, social truths, shift over time. What I am interested in is the form that articulations of power take and how they operate on us, on our individual and collective psyche—in the mechanics of it. How that form is composed, its cadence, its weight, its ability to conceal, to reveal, its touch. Art as an expressive medium embodies the soft power of culture. It operates discreetly, and art can bring that to the surface. What it reveals is not only the discreet conditions that determine the “how”, “when” and “why” but our unique capacity to transcend these conditions. It reveals our potential for liberation.
MC: I agree that form is an articulated power. There are lots of powers and principalities in life: existential, emotional and cultural powers. Art’s formal and semantic ambiguity prevents it from acting in a coercive way like propaganda. Art is metaphysical propaganda. It functions in service to more than one cause and more than one kind of cause. It shouldn’t be pragmatic or narrow in its effect.
This exhibition brings together two very different practices, but it also brings together two artists who share a life together. What have you learned about each other’s work through living and working so closely?
MC: Nyeema and I both work with different degrees of immediacy versus mediation. Drawing, for example, is a vastly more immediate practice than printmaking. Nyeema mixes media: drawing, printmaking, sculpture, etc., and creates a shared time space where thought is simultaneously expressed and repressed, framed and expanded. I handle medium in a similar way, pulling in multiple directions at once.
NM: Because we’re in constant dialogue with each other, I never think of our work as being so different because we share similar concerns, although from slightly different perspectives. His artistic project is so much greater than painting. Painting is the medium, but, to me, the gravitas of painting doesn’t overwhelm the work. I’ve always admired how cavalier Michael is regarding the making, the hands-on work. I’ve never painted. My father is a painter; my mother painted, and Michael’s a painter. And although I admire it deeply, the field seems so burdensome to me—so haunted. But Michael enters into it with a keen awareness of this history, unburdened by it. He’s really doing his own thing, and it’s exciting to watch. Watching him over the years has inspired me to loosen up and take more risks in my own practice.
Photo: Robert Chase Heishman for Bob./ Courtesy of the Neubauer Collegium.
The exhibition includes a collaborative audio piece about the mythology of the artist’s life. Which ideas about what it means to be an artist still hold power today, and which feel most limiting?
NM: I think Michael and I will have very different answers. He may correct me, but as a male artist, I think the old archetypes are still appealing to him—the bravado, the antisocial behaviour. To be honest, it’s appealing to me too because it’s heroic. But as a young artist, when I was told these stories about Picasso’s philandering or Van Gogh’s isolation, they were not for me, as a woman artist, to subsume into my own identity even in the 20th century. It wouldn’t be as charming. But I do hold on to, and value, the belief in the artist as a heroic figure.
MC:I agree that being a cultural hero requires a cultural consensus about your work, and consensus is political. Culture is generational learning, and part of what we learn from generation to generation is how to maintain social hierarchy and ignore the achievements of marginalised colleagues. In the U.S., it is hard for women, minorities, and foreigners to have our cultural achievements acknowledged, let alone widely praised, let alone profit us in our lifetime. But well-made culture widens the world for the viewer even when defying consensus.
Both of your practices pay attention to things that sit on the margins, whether overlooked information, hidden meanings, or peripheral spaces. What can we learn by looking away from the centre?
MC: Knowledge of marginal information, meanings, and spaces widens our cultural vision. It lets us teach ourselves things that are increasingly diverse, flexible and radical, so that we have enough concepts to build a livable social present.
The space of aesthetics is always flooded with the politics of the neo-this or that. We are constantly grasping for a promising idea and putting together workable concepts to build the next aesthetic moment in our work. If practice is a circle with a neglected margin and an exhausted center, everything we currently need is at the margin.
This exhibition was on view at Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society from 7 April until 28 June 2026.
