Through a practice that combines intergenerational history, archival research, and the histories and theories of art and film, Andrea Carlson (b. 1979) creates incisive works of resistance and sovereignty that disempower colonial storytelling and practices of erasure. A descendant of the Grand Portage Ojibwe and Scandinavian settlers, Carlson centers an institutional critique and perspective that has been systematically excluded from or historically romanticized in narratives, practices, and presentations of American art. 

In Carlson’s layered, multi-panel paintings—made with oil, acrylic, gouache, colored pencil, graphite, watercolor, and ink—the horizon line is a persistent organizing principle, inspired by the ungraspable horizon line of Lake Superior. Viewers are seduced into her intricate collage-like imagery, and yet beyond the central foregrounded figures there is an impenetrability into the dense distance. The overwhelming scale of her works too denies us access into the imagined landscapes, preventing a kind of possession of the land. Carlson’s practice interrogates longing and desire, permission and refusal, as well as themes around Indigenous sovereignty and Land Back. 

A 2024 Creative Capital Fellow, Carlson is developing a body of work entitled Endless Sunshine, which comprises large-scale paintings on birchbark. The exhibition at CAM will be the artist’s first opportunity to show these works in a museum setting. Recent screenprints, paintings, and sculpture will also be on view. 

Andrea Carlson: Endless Sunshine is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Misa Jeffereis, Associate Curator.