Andrea Carlson

Andrea Carlson (Ojibwe) works in film, drawing, and painting to create vividly intricate imagery that incisively pursues and maps the mosaic entanglement of cultural narratives and institutional authority as they relate to objects based on the merit of possession, posterity, and display. She frequently grapples with the vastness of decolonization, and additionally, is currently analyzing land narratives, assimilation metaphors, and Indigenous futurisms.

Carlson’s solo exhibitions have been held at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor (2022–2024), the Plains Art Museum in Fargo (2010), the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York (2009–2010),and La Centrale galerie Powerhouse, Montreal (2016), among others. Her public art commissions include You are on Potawatomi Land, presented on the Chicago Riverwalk (2021–2023) and RED EXIT, exhibited by the Whitney Museum of American Art with TF Cornerstone and High Line Art (2021). Recent group exhibitions in 2022 include the Toronto Biennial of Art, theCleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, and Breaking Water at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. Carlson has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships including the United States Artist Visual Art Fellowship (2022), a Joan Mitchell Center Residency (2020), and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2017). Select institutions who have acquired Carlson’s work include the Whitney Museum of American Art, the British Museum, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Walker Art Center. 

In 2020, Carlson co-founded the Center for Native Futures—the only Native art center in Chicago. 

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