About

Michael Dotson was born in Cleveland, Ohio and grew up on the grounds of a decommissioned amusement park—an early landscape of spectacle, ruins, fantasy, and invention that continues to echo through his work. Exposed to art from childhood through his mother’s studies in toy design, he spent formative hours around studios and wandering alone through the nearby Cleveland Museum of Art, developing an early fascination with image-making, mythology, and constructed worlds.

After moving to East Aurora, New York—home of Fisher-Price and the craft legacy of the Roycroft—Dotson’s interest in the intersection of design, play, and handmade form deepened. In Providence, Rhode Island, he studied figure drawing at Rhode Island School of Design while in high school before attending Cleveland Institute of Art, initially intending to pursue car design before committing fully to painting.

He later earned his MFA at American University in Washington, D.C., while becoming part of the fertile Baltimore art scene where he began exhibiting. Since moving to Brooklyn, Dotson has developed a distinct visual language that merges hard-edge precision, biomorphic figuration, speculative imagery, and psychological space.

His paintings often inhabit a zone between dream and design, where bodies mutate, symbols become beings, and abstraction takes on an uncanny vitality. Drawing equally from craft, science fiction, comics, metaphysics, and formal painting histories, his work proposes alternate realities charged with humor, sensuality, and wonder.

Dotson has exhibited and is collected internationally, with solo exhibitions in London, Hong Kong, Paris, Los Angeles, and New York, and his work has been featured in Frieze, HypeArt, Huffington Post, and New American Paintings.