Mike Cloud, mixed-media assemblage, Hammer Projects

Hammer Projects: Mike Cloud

Now showing28 March 2026 – 10 January 2027Free

Chicago artist Mike Cloud's large-scale collaged portraits and mixed-media assemblages exploring consumer culture and childhood.

Exhibition website

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On now All of November 2026

One of the quilts here started life as children's Halloween costumes. In Dorothy Costume Quilt Back (2007) the fabric is set into oil paint on an oddly shaped canvas, 96 by 110 inches, built on bare stretcher bars.

It comes from Painted Clothing (2007–08), Cloud's series of collages made from kids' clothes, where dragons, fairies and rainbows carry what the Hammer calls the link between consumer culture and childhood. Other quilts are long-sleeve shirts patched over wooden bars. The rest of the show climbs the lobby wall: three large "loosely abstracted portraits", two of them commissioned for it, collaged from paper grocery bags, magazine ads, cash and other printed matter.

Look up as you come in: the portraits are on the lobby wall itself, not in a gallery. Admission is free, Tuesday to Sunday, 11am to 6pm, and this is the Chicago artist's first solo museum show on the West Coast.

Look for

Dorothy Costume Quilt Back (front), 2007
Look for kids' Halloween costume fabric worked into oil paint over an oddly shaped canvas, 96 by 110 inches.
Homerun Mets Quilt, 2007
Long-sleeve shirts patched together on top of wooden stretcher bars, 104 by 86 inches, the work the Hammer put on its spring press release.
Mouse Skull and Fairy Quilt, 2007
Multicolored fabric hanging from roughly 16 wooden bars, and at 70 by 72 inches the smallest of the quilts the Hammer pictures.
The lobby wall portraits
Three large portraits, two made for this show, collaged from paper grocery bags, magazine advertisements and cash across the lobby wall.