New and recent work by Andrea Carlson at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM) presents a solo exhibition by Andrea Carlson (b. 1979, Grand Portage Ojibwe/European descent), whose practice reclaims and reimagines narratives of land, belonging, and representation. The exhibition will include a body of work entitled “Endless Sunshine”—comprising new large-scale paintings on birchbark—as well as paintings on paper, screenprints, and sculpture made between 2018 and the present. “Andrea Carlson: Endless Sunshine” will be on view at CAM from March 6–August 9, 2026.
Based in Northern Minnesota, Carlson is primarily a landscape artist who challenges historical fictions through powerful mixed-media works. At the core of her practice is an intentional opposition to the colonialist impulse to own and conquer. Her paintings interrogate longing and desire, permission and refusal, as well as themes around efforts to reclaim ancestral lands.
Carlson creates incisive works of resistance that dismantle colonial storytelling and practices of erasure through an artistic practice that combines intergenerational history, archival research, and increasingly personal references, as well as references to Western art history and film theory. Carlson examines how institutions, museums, and archives shape dominant understandings of the American landscape, and how Indigenous knowledge and sovereignty challenge and transform those views.
“Carlson’s work rewrites the visual vocabulary of historical landscape painting and turns it into an act of reclamation,” says Associate Curator Misa Jeffereis. “Her layered paintings confront histories of erasure and dispossession, opening portals to a decolonized future.”
Carlson’s intricate, multi-panel paintings—made with oil, acrylic, gouache, colored pencil, graphite, watercolor, and ink—point to vivid, imagined landscapes. The horizon line is a persistent organizing principle, inspired by the vast and elusive expanse of Lake Superior. Viewers are drawn into her dense, collage-like imagery, only to encounter impenetrable depths beyond the central figures and landscapes. The scale of Carlson’s works, some as large as 10 feet tall and 15 feet wide, resists containment and denies the viewer any illusion of possession over the land.
For her presentation at CAM, Carlson is developing a body of work entitled Endless Sunshine, comprising large-scale paintings on birchbark—her first undertaking of this material, which is deeply connected to her ancestral homeland. This exhibition marks the premier of these works, with additional new paintings, screenprints, and sculpture expanding on the artist’s continued inquiry into how land holds narratives of power and dispossession.
“Carlson’s paintings carry a sense of monumentality that will come alive within CAM’s open and light-filled architecture,” says Jeffereis. “In this space, visitors will be able to experience the full breadth of her practice—its expansiveness, its precision, and its reverence for story and place.”
Rooted in visual and linguistic preservation, this exhibition invites audiences to reconsider how landscapes are imagined and remembered, and how art can illuminate paths toward collective healing and self-determination.
“Andrea Carlson: Endless Sunshine” is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Misa Jeffereis, Associate Curator, with support from Grace Early, Exhibitions Assistant.
