Michael Mckeown was born in 1959 in Gateshead, Northern England across the River Tyne from Newcastle. Known for its heavy industries, it was a target for the German Luftwaffe during the Second World War. Bombs exploded on residential streets. These sites covered with rubble, became places to play.
Michael attended Art School at sixteen in Preston, England. At eighteen, he went to Manchester Polytech graduating three years later with a BA in Sculpture. He was influenced by American authors Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, musicians Sonny Stitt and Ornette Colman also artists Robert Smithson, Eva Hess, and Richard Serra were a big influence. Michael won a Scholarship from The Royal College of Art in London to study abroad in New York City where he enrolled in the New York Studio School.
Michael had his first one-person show in NYC at John Davis Gallery in SOHO in 1989. During the 1990s shows included the Weatherspoon Museum and Arti in Amsterdam.The Missile Museum project was started in 2008 with small ink drawings from memories of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seen on Tv as a child. Recently, select missiles and drawings from the Missile Museum have been shown in London, Helsinki, Art Basel Switzerland, Berlin Germany, Art Basel Miami, and New York City. The Missile Museum Project seeks to point out that the continued use and development of these munitions of mass destruction are one of the biggest wastes of global resources of our time