Artist Bio

Kathleen McCloud’s art projects are immersions into what is close to home and heart and worthy of studio investigation. Her own migration, from White Plains, NY where she was born, to the industrial suburbs of the Midwest and the pristine Rocky Mountains before settling in New Mexico, is at the core of much of her work. Art making is the way she tracks and investigates the shifting cultural and personal terrain. Past projects include Futurology: Welcome to the Third Wave, a multi-media exploration into the Futurist writings of Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler regarding digital media and the information age. During the course of the project (2009-2011, culminating in a solo exhibition with Axle Contemporary in Santa Fe, NM), McCloud transformed the limbs of a dead apple tree near her house into cartoonish, giant pencils. She carved plywood panels and printed text acronyms- OMG, WTF, TMI. Nodding to antique methods of printing and communication, she bushwhacked through new media culture and revealed her findings through the studio work that developed.

With the same intense curiosity, she took a personal collection of papers and objects she’d inherited from a distant uncle, into her studio for a 3-year sojourn into surrealism, Henry Miller, metaphysics and the Tropic of Cancer (the collection contained correspondence between Miller and her uncle). An article about the project ‘Hotel Central’ was published in Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal, Volume 10. ’Tropic of Cancer: Let’s Smuggle’’ was exhibited at the Santa Fe Community Gallery in 2016. She reconfigures the objects made in response to the archive materials into new installations focused on contemporary themes of censorship, and the link between war, migration and spiritual seeking. Following her time travel into 1930s Paris, McCloud dug into her home in La Cieneguilla, a historic land grant south of Santa Fe, NM. During her residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute in the fall, 2016, she photographed and researched a controversial riparian restoration project along the Santa Fe River near her house. Her mixed- media photomontages and woodcuts of the now abandoned beaver ponds were presented at SFAI, part of an ongoing look at climate, migration, and the aliens and natives who make up ‘diversity’ over big time- all the way back to late Pleistocene. From her epic investigations, many small quiet works are generated. The titles sometimes provide a conceptual clue but it is up to the viewer to unfold the narrative. The visual experience presents a field of possibilities, not declarations. McCloud’s work has been exhibited in museums and art spaces across the US and is in private and public collections, including: New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe Community College, Hyatt Collection, NM Central Community College NMAIPP and the Herradura Collection.

Artist’s Statement

My print-based paper constructions, collages and paintings are open ended narratives where current events, history and mythology converge. In 2016, during a water rights themed residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute, I focused on the lower Santa Fe River which flows by my home in La Cieneguilla, southwest of Santa Fe. Agua es Vida- water is life- is a popular saying here. It was then that I realized that the river, Cottonwoods and layered history of the place I called home, was a microcosm of the complexity and challenges of life on planet earth at this time. During the isolation of the pandemic, the echo of the past in my present is louder than ever. In the studio, I am working with time, what is rooted, what is uncertain, patterns of connection and the chaos that accompanies change. It is exciting, a page turner, an epic narrative that restores me to the web of life and cycles back out into the world in the form of mixed-media art works.

Curriculum Vitae

BORN: White Plains, NY; USA

CURRENT: Visual artist working in painting, printmaking and installation;

Lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2018 The Meta-Tourist, GFContemporary, Santa Fe, New Mexico

2013 LoudWHISPER, Ernesto Mayans Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico

2011 Futurology: Welcome to the Third Wave, Axle Projects,

multi-media installation

2011 In A Gadda Da Vida, Ernesto Mayans Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico

2005 Co-Evolving, Ernesto Mayans Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico

2004 Mindspring, Ernesto Mayans Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico

2003 Be Still- Everything is Turning, Ernesto Mayans Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico

2002 The Other Hemisphere of Being, Ernesto Mayans Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico

2001 Wing & Root, Ernesto Mayans Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico

GROUP EXHIBITIONS (SELECTED)

2016 Flats and Rounds, 2-person exhibition, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, September-November

2016 In Color, print archives 10Grand Press, 333 montezuma arts, Santa Fe, NM

2016 Banned, Santa Fe Community Gallery, Santa Fe, NM

2015 Re-imagined, Cornell Museum of Art-Delray Beach, FL

2015 What if? Collaborative exhibition between writers-visual artists in conjunction with Cut+Paste Society, El Zaguan, Santa Fe, NM

2015 Axle inside at Peter’s Projects, Santa Fe, NM

2013 Traveling, Raveling, 3-person exhibit, Axle Projects, Santa Fe, NM

2012 Odes & Offerings, collaborative exhibition of poetry and the visual arts, Santa Fe, Arts Commission Community Gallery, (catalogue published 2013)

2011 Mining the Unconscious, Santa Fe Community Gallery/Convention Center

2010 Abstraction, group show at William Havu Gallery, Denver, Colorado

2010 TEXAS NATIONAL:2010, Group show, Cole Art Center, Judy Pfaff juror,

2007 ORIGINALS 2007, group show at the Harwood Museum Taos, NM

2006 Language:The Interconnections between Images and the Written Word, Rotunda Gallery, New Mexico State Capitol- Rotunda Gallery

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

Chhaap Foundation for Printmaking, Artist Residency, Gujarat, India Winter 2018
Santa Fe Art Institute Residency program, Water Rights, Fall 2016
Jentel Artist Residency- November-December 2014
The Artist is In, public presentation of ongoing project Open Letters from Hotel Central; Axle Contemporary, Santa Fe, New Mexico, July 2013
Anderson Ranch, Paint Installation Systems, 2012
Creative Capital Professional Development Program, 2012

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

New Mexico Museum of Art permanent collection 2017

New Mexico Central Community College, NM AIPP 2016

Herradura Collection 2013

Hyatt Collection 2009

Santa Fe Community College, Dean’s Purchase Award 2009

EDUCATION

University of Colorado, Boulder

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hinchas de Poesia, Spring 2016 http://www.hinchasdepoesia.com/dev2185215/kathleen-mccloud-border-crossing/
Richard Tobin, The Eye who Came in from the cold, http://issuu.com/flavorgrafix/docs/_the_april_issue-web/51?e=1811192%2F12202256 THE magazine, April 2015
Odes and Offerings, collaborative exhibition of poetry and visual art, catalogue, 2013
Open Letters from Hotel Central: Correspondence between Henry Miller, Emil Schnellock and Posterity Project article ‘’NEXUS:The International Henry Miller Journal’’Vol.10 Fall 2013
Kathryn Davis interview on ArtBeat, KVSF 101.5 Hutton Broadcasting, Santa Fe, NM October 17, 2013 (http://www.kathleenmccloud.com/works/3d.php)
Michael Abatemarco, Séance with Henry Miller and Emil Schnellock, The New Mexican-Pasatiempo, January 11, 2013, p.36-37
Paul Weideman, Surfing the Third Wave, The New Mexican-Pasatiempo, March 18, 2011, p 36-37

Kathleen McCloud

Swallows Return, 2022