Michael Jones McKean (born 1976) is an American artist and educator.
McKean's work explores the nature of objects in relation to folklore, technology, anthropology, and mysticism. His complex installations and sculptures merge expansive but highly specific orderings of materials, processes and substances.
McKean's work engages an interest in deep time, timescales and their collapse, in the process decentering historically anthropocentric registrations of events, distances and meaning. McKean often presents seemingly incongruous objects in careful arrangement, at times quoting vernacular museological display techniques. Through his working process he questions stable definitions such as real and replica, natural and synthetic, fact and fiction, past and future by employing diverse media such as ancient meteorites, primitive textiles, obsolete technologies, raw clay, psychotropic medicines, and prismatic rainbows.