Michael Cook was born in Puerto Rico and
educated in The United Kingdom and the United States. Upon finishing
graduate school he accepted an appointment at the University of Illinois
at Urbana Champaign where he began work on his nuclear and
thermonuclear paintings, one the earliest concentrated bodies of work in
painting that examined the development and use of the atom by
conflating the visual language of alchemical notation and particle
physics. Throughout his work Michael Cook has conflated painting
pictorial conventions and practice to question their distance from
authentic experience. This work and later projects have explored the
definition of landscape. Expanding the understanding of " landscape"
beyond the literal image of geography has been at the core of his
concerns by employing a method of visual semiotics. As Kathleen Stewart
Howe wrote in her essay on the exhibition Veneer; “What are the
conditions under which objects become visible in culture? What is the
personal and human significance of those visual manifestations? These
are questions Cook has pursued in his paintings since the bubble chamber
paintings of the late 1970’s.”
Michael Cook has been an
influential educator. He previously held appointments at the University
of Illinois, Chicago and Urbana/Champaign, the University of California,
Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute before coming to the
University of New Mexico. At UC Berkeley he developed and taught the
first video/performance classes in the art department called “Temporal
and Linear Structures” as well as painting. At the University of New
Mexico as Associate Dean for Technology he conceptualized and helped
implement the Arts Technology Center, which became ArtsLab. Also at UNM
he developed “Nature and Technology” an innovative intensive field
study class as part of the D.H. Lawrence Ranch Workshops whose structure
has been adopted in a number of department classes.
Michael
Cook’s work has been exhibited widely in such venues as The New Museum,
New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts
in Santa Fe as well as commercial galleries. Exhibitions have received
critical attention in The New York Times, Art News, The New Art
Examiner, The San Francisco Chronicle and THE Magazine among others. He
has been the recipient of a number of awards such as Outstanding Teacher
of the Year and a prestigious National Endowment for the Arts
Individual Artists Fellowship.