{"article":{"id":11915,"title":"Andrea Carlson: Mapping New Futures","excerpt":"","body":"

Andrea Carlson, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman. Photo: Philip Maisel.



Note: this interview is the cover feature for CGN's spring/summer 2026 magazine. To purchase a print copy or subscription click here.



By ALISON REILLY


Andrea Carlson’s layered, large-scale paintings explore the liminality of the shoreline–specifically the Great Lakes. Born and raised in northern Minnesota, Carlson’s complex landscapes pulse with repeated geometric patterns, portraits of animals, and the products of art making such as pottery, baskets, and statues set against a persistent horizon line. Through her work, she challenges the colonial cannibalism of Indigenous peoples and cultures and presents new, counter narratives. Carlson, who exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2024-2025, has been busy preparing her upcoming exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, which will feature a new series of paintings on birchbark along with screenprints and sculpture.


CGN: What are some of your earliest memories making art?


Andrea Carlson: I doubt there was a single day growing up when I didn’t draw, so it is really hard for me to isolate specific memories. Typically I’d draw horses as a kid, because they were the most beautiful animal I could imagine. When I was about six years old, my dad was going to throw away some roller window blinds that were made of thick paper. I remember that he cut off the metal rods on the ends of the blinds and gave me the paper part. I was able to draw large horses on those, and that was his idea. He told me that I had to fill the whole sheet. It seemed like every birthday or Christmas, someone would give me a RoseArt box set of artists’ pens, pencils, and watercolors, and I would burn through those supplies pretty quickly. 


CGN: When did you know that you wanted to be an artist? 


AC: I come from a family of artists going all the way back. I was always an artist, there was no realization, no story. In college I had a moment of doubt when thinking about my employment prospects as an artist. I thought maybe I should pursue linguistics for grad school, because I learned Ojibwe in undergrad, and I really loved teaching the language. In the end, art school won out, and I went to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design for my MFA and have been working as an artist ever since. 


CGN: What is a typical day in your studio like? 


AC: The image of me in my studio is so bleak: it is just my broken body sitting, hunched over a table for 12 hours a day including weekends. That has been going on for years now. Sometimes I have online meetings and take calls, but generally I’m in a trance while making work. I’m able to listen to audiobooks while I work, and I solicit everyone for book recommendations. I’m on a horror kick right now, but I’ll go through entire genres of books. I’ll listen to anything. Recently, I was able to hire a studio manager, and it is so odd to have another person in my space. It might be better to work with people, because when I spend so much time by myself I get a little socially odd and then, in total contrast, I’ll be hoisted out on stage for artist talks and openings. 


My studio is on Lake Superior now and that is helpful as far as feeling a sense of belonging and security. Looking over the lake before I start my day and in the evening is very grounding for me. It is a privilege and honor to be so close to that lake. 



Andrea Carlson, The Buffet, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman. Photo: Philip Maisel.



CGN: How does your location–Chicago, Minneapolis, or northern Minnesota–affect the work you create?


AC: Many of my paintings are organized against the backdrop of the endless horizon of the Great Lakes. Although place is very important, many people can relate to a body of water, a mountain range, or other natural landmarks as having personhood or a sense of being. The land I reference in the work is not as specific as these post-settler place names, but more general, as if land could be seen as an access point to infinity. We all live on a sphere, a seemingly infinite surface, or infinite horizon. But there is also deep time under our feet. I live on the Laurentian Shield, on the north shore of what is now called Minnesota. The land is older than dinosaurs, and there are very few fossils here because the land mass at the surface came into existence before most life forms came into being. 


One view of my work is how the earth buries narratives and takes things back. People, objects, the lives of animals, films, stories, books, teachings can all move across the surface, everything can have a diaspora, but it usually ends with things being put into the ground. In my work, the objects, film, and animal references are pre-internment, temporary, and out-of-context to the land. They are passengers heightened by the seeming oddness of their presence and arrangement against the land, or the shore of the seascape I put them on.


I often refer to the shore as a liminal space, not fully water or land. It is a space of transition where I hold things in relation to each other, but it is also a space of the Great Lakes. There is so much shoreline in the middle of this continent, so much liminality.


CGN: What is your process for making these intricate, complex paintings and drawings?


AC: My process starts with observation and conversations, reading, collecting imagery that is important to the subject of the work, or looking into a museum’s collection. Writing is a big part of my process. After I have collected the ideas I draw in light sketches and organize each figure on the paper. To complete the process for the work to have meaning it has to be seen by people. It starts in conversation and is completed in conversation. 



Andrea Carlson, The Buffet (detail), 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman. Photo: Philip Maisel.



CGN: Can you tell me about some of the most important objects that appear in your large-scale works like The Buffet? 


AC: There isn’t any one object or reference I feel is more important than another, but in the center of this painting you will see Namadjii (brand) pottery and black ash baskets that have an interesting history. Namadjii is an Ojibwe word taken from a place name in Minnesota where the clay was harvested. The pottery was meant to “look native” even though it was made by settlers. Nevertheless, those vessels are still made from Ojibwe land, and the appropriation is an act of violence. The black ash baskets reference a form of basket making that is threatened by the invasive emerald ash borer. At the center of the piece, where the baskets and pottery are placed, animals are hiding under and around the table, as a depiction of “The Last Supper” or in this case that moment before the meteors strike. 


CGN: Cannibalism appears as a recurring motif in your work. How did you first become interested in exploring it? Why is it important to your work? 


AC: I got interested in cannibalism, as a metaphor, because I got pissed off. I watched a horror film called Cannibal Holocaust while an undergrad, and it bothered me so terribly. I was also researching a lot of decolonial and post-colonial theory then and had noticed how the idea of cannibalism was used by scholars to describe settlers and aspects of colonization that dangerously consumed Indigenous people. Cannibalism was a metaphor for assimilation policies: consuming the other and making it part of the colonial body and identity. Jack D. Forbes wrote Columbus and Other Cannibals, bell hooks wrote an essay called “Eating the Other,” Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes by Michael Ames, Deborah Root’s Cannibal Culture, to name a few. These books also referenced an Ojibwe monster, the Windigo, to talk about the cannibal sickness of settler colonialism. All of these pieces of information were coming to me at the same time, and I felt that my VORE series could act as a witness, almost an “I witness the continuation of these things” in my landscapes. 



Andrea Carlson, Low Relief Mound, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman. Photo: Philip Maisel.



CGN: When did you start incorporating sculpture and video into your art practice? What motivated you to do so? 


AC: In 2014 I made a few videos of masks being dissected for a solo exhibition at Plug In ICA in Winnipeg. A few years before that I had made film props and assisted in production for Shezad Dawood’s film A Mystery Play. That film was also produced at Plug In ICA. I enjoy making sculptures, and I’m a tremendous fan of film works, but painting and drawing on paper has taken precedence in my career. That will more-than-likely change in the coming years. I have plans to make more sculptures.


When it comes to film, I think the element of movement and time is interesting. Non-static art forms can’t be held all at once in the mind or can’t be observed in a fixed state because it’s always changing. I wanted my large-scale paintings and sculpture to work in a way that has to be traversed. The sculpture is relatively new in my professional work, but I have always done sculptural things, whether the mentioned film props or putting things together in a three-dimensional way. The large scale wooden column work came about through the Toronto Biennial, when I started doing sculpture as standalone work. 


CGN: Can you tell me about your upcoming exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis? What other projects are you currently working on?


AC: The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis will feature a few new works including Red Welcome, a ten-foot tall and eighteen-foot long work, as well as some work that I’ve been making for my Creative Capital grant. I also have a traveling exhibition organized by the Denver Art Museum that will be going to the Ringling Museum [Sarasota, FL] and Nasher Museum of Art [at Duke University]. I’m also developing some paintings on canvas and sculptural works for an upcoming museum exhibition that isn’t announced yet. I have a lot on my plate, but I am getting ready to have a few weeks off after the CAM St. Louis opening.



Andrea Carlson, The Host, 2025, Detail view. Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman. Photo: Philip Maisel.



CGN: What motivated you to co-found the Center for Native Futures in Chicago? How has your work with the Center influenced your own art practice? 


AC: The Center for Native Futures was a COVID baby. During the pandemic, Debra Yepa-Pappan organized online weekly meetings amongst a few Native artists in Chicago. At the time she was working at the Field Museum. We all missed each other, and we all wanted proximity to each other again. Through these meetings, Debra, her husband Chris Pappan, and Monica Rickert-Bolter shared their long-time dream of making a gallery where Native people had a say in what was on the walls, agency and space. The Terra Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation agreed and generously supported us. There is an irony in Native people asking for space in a land where we were forcibly removed, and a city seemingly hell bent on depicting Native people through stereotypical imagery. We wanted to contribute to healing through this space. I’m not sure that co-founding CfNF has influenced my own art practice in a direct sense, but I’ve become more sensitive to the love and care people put into the spaces I exhibit in. There is a lot of labor that goes into supporting artists’ work. Every time we exhibit as artists, there is unseen labor and people who are advocating and lifting behind the scenes.


*


Andrea Carlson: Endless Sunshine is on view at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, March 6-August 9, 2026. 


For more information, visit mikinaak.com and jessicasilvermangallery.com





Note: this interview is the cover feature for CGN's spring/summer 2026 magazine. To purchase a print copy or subscription click here.

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Fall offers a full slate of exhibitions across galleries and museums throughout the Midwest. Behind the scenes, many people in the community are working tirelessly to support artists and bring fresh perspectives to the public. We spoke with five insiders about what excites them now and what they anticipate next.


The following preview is one of five conversations that appear in CGN's Fall 2026 magazine. To receive a copy of the print edition click here.





Nikko Washington – 

Artist


“I’m thrilled to further expand my artistic and design practice by introducing other mediums into the mix. I’m looking forward to watching the seasons change and devoting a lot of time in the studio as well. Fall/winter is my favorite time to create new works. 


I have an upcoming solo show with VSG Contemporary that I am excited about. The work will delve further into the topics of cultural mythology and how these tales and narratives have helped shape my worldview. 


Also, it wouldn’t be right if I left out my excitement for this upcoming season of Chicago sports.”


Nikko Washington


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Andi Crist, Extension Cords, Glazed stoneware, chrome, Sizes vary 2021-present. Photo: Mikey Mosher




This interview is part of CGN's Fall 2026 issue. Purchase a copy or subscribe.




Andi Crist



BY ALISON REILLY


Andi Crist’s warm, engaging demeanor is evident in the first few minutes of our conversation. Generous with her time and forthcoming in her observations, she cares deeply about building relationships through her art making. Crist grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, devoured art classes, wrote songs and played music in high school, and moved to Chicago to study visual art at Columbia College. In 2024, she received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a woodworker, sculptor, ceramicist, and conceptual artist, and she teaches at Illinois Institute of Technology. We discussed her multidisciplinary practice, her experience working as an art handler, preparator, and fabricator, and how she thinks about labor, creativity, and value in the art world. 



CGN: You grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. How did that environment shape your point of view as an artist?


Andi Crist: That’s such a funny question. Nobody’s ever really asked.


CGN: Oh, really?


AC: Yeah, maybe because I never was super connected with the arts community down in Birmingham. I moved to Chicago in 2007, so it’s been 20 years since I lived in the South. I was definitely one of those art kids—one art credit was required in high school, and I graduated with like seven. I was surrounded by artists who had a big impact on me, because they were working artists. All my art teachers were trained in Alabama and then continued to teach and work in Alabama, which gave me this desire to try to expand my community outside of what I was familiar with.


CGN: Do you identify as a Chicagoan?


AC: My family still lives in Alabama, and I go back every year. I love being in Alabama. Maybe now being in Chicago for almost 20 years, I identify as a southerner living in the city. I carry on the social qualities of a friendly southern person [laughs]. 


CGN: You have a varied art practice—woodwork, ceramics, mold making. What drew you to those types of fabrication methods and that type of art making?


AC: My dad is a carpenter and a hobbyist woodworker, but his career was psychology, and my mom was a professor and an incredible craftswoman. I absorbed my mom’s model of creativity, which is to try a bunch of different things and not necessarily finish them but to try to learn as much as I can by just going for it. My practice over the years has become an exploration of conceptual elements of what makes art art and not just craft. Do you have to be a master craftsperson or a professional artist in order to make something that resonates with people?


I make a lot of work that references the mode of making and requires a variety of different media. I just finished teaching a ceramics production class where students learned how to produce molds, think about positives and negatives, and get into a level of production rather than just handicraft as a way to multiply their output.


I got into fabrication because I’ve always liked working with other artists. I have a background in theater and gallery work. I’m a voracious learner, and I like being able to share those skills with my community. Then I end up making work about that. It’s a self-feeding cycle.


Andi Crist, Artist’s Ladder, 2023. Photo: Jeff Perlman



CGN: Thinking about your background as an art handler and preparator—how did you get to the point where you were making work about that experience?


AC: In 2010, right before I graduated from Columbia, I was living in a storefront in West Logan Square with my partner at the time. We started a gallery called Autotelic in the space and had to build it out using the worst tools with very minimal resources. Then we started curating shows there and that meant helping other artists figure out how to install their work in our unusual space. Eventually, I gained the reputation for knowing how to do that type of work. I started getting invited to work in museums and galleries. 


The Holocaust Museum was the first museum I worked at, and as difficult as that subject matter is, that experience was really important to me because I was learning more about the larger world of gallery work. As an artist working as a preparator, you’re straddling both sides of that space. You’re really seeing how the sausage is made. You’re hearing all the conversations about artists, curators, the process of exhibition making. There is a lot of information you can gather about the economics of the art world by just being the person that has the know-how to touch and handle artwork. Eventually that started feeding into my art practice because I wanted to make work that was contributing to a conversation around art as a type of job. It fueled a methodology of seeing everything in the world as the result of a long line of processes that required effort and thoughtfulness by many hands.



Andi Crist, Fair Warning, 2025.



CGN: The title of your recent exhibition at the Cleve Carney Museum—Live, Laugh, Lo—sorry, not Live, Laugh, Love—Live, Laugh, Labor.


AC: [Laughs] That’s what everybody does.


CGN: I love the title—it’s perfect. You incorporate humor along with thoughtful critiques about labor and value in your work. What role does humor play? How does it help you connect with your audience?


AC: One of my biggest criticisms of art with a capital A is how easily it can be overly intellectualized. I think that’s why I end up making a lot of work that references things that already exist or have some kind of real purpose. It’s important to give people a foothold so there’s an obvious place to board that train of thought. As an artist—maybe this is me getting into a sweeping argument about what artists should be—but I personally believe in intellectual accessibility. Humor is a swift way to drop defenses and allow people to come in without feeling like they are not getting the joke or not understanding. I like to make work that can hold both of those things at the same time—it’s funny on the surface level, it’s kind of cheeky, but there’s also another way to look at it that is intellectually clever. There is a joy in the attempt to “get it”. Like the satisfaction of grasping how a crossword puzzle actually works.


It’s also so much a part of my personality. I take myself seriously as an artist, but my ego isn’t at the heart of it. It’s really something that I do because I love to make things, and I love to connect with other people. My parents raised me on puns, creating those language relationships between things and people and space. Understanding a joke is the same way that we understand art, and while neither of my parents would consider themselves artists, they taught me how to think about art.



Andi Crist, 69 Bananas




CGN: Your work, Artist’s Ladder, explores hierarchies, workplace cultures, and institutional values. What experiences shaped your reflections on these themes?

 

AC: The ladder piece distinctly represents the complicated relationship between front of house, back of house, and the hierarchy of labor. Who is the artist in those relationships? How much does another person’s knowledge and expertise contribute to the success of another artist?


There are enormous, industrialized art practices out there, warehouses full of people making things, and those people are also artists. When you make work that involves other people, it’s important to acknowledge their contributions. I’ve had complicated interactions with other artists who are like, ‘Hey, do you want to collaborate with me on this thing?’ but really they just want me to make their idea. I made Artist’s Ladder while I was in grad school at UIC, and it really represented my relationship with a lot of other artists, because I could be an actual support structure for them. Then it turned into this absurd physical thing. It’s extremely overbuilt with inlaid racing stripes made of exotic hardwood, and a butcher’s block-style plaid top. It’s not really like an FU as much as it is asking for acknowledgement of my skills and the essential support structures that exist.

 

CGN: I want to ask you about another piece, Five O’Clock Somewhere, a wool rug that resembles a children’s play mat. I work at a library, and it reminded me of rugs I see all the time. It’s a peaceful image of an office park with a large fountain surrounded by a parking lot. I’m curious why you chose a rug as the medium to depict that image.

 

AC: To me the heart of that joke was that it was a landscape. I wanted it to be physically traversable. And that was, I don’t want to say controversial, but it was something that I had to talk about a lot. The critique of that work was the fact that I didn’t want to hang it on the wall and turn it into a tapestry. I really wanted it to be a rug that people could walk on. When I showed that work at Chicago Artists Coalition for the New City Breakout Artists show. There was a lot of pushback about having it on the floor and allowing people to walk on it.

 

That, to me, was such an important conversation, because, in my mind, the fact that you could walk across it and traverse it was part of how I was thinking about the object. Rugs are utilitarian–they are floor coverings. When you make art that doesn’t do anything, you don’t get to participate in that part of the conversation.

 

I enjoy sparring around art like that. I am totally tickled by the pushback. The critique of display is exciting, and sorting through the politics of utilitarianism in art spaces is fun to me. And then—it was so crazy—we ended up showing it halfway on the wall and halfway on the ground. 


Andi Crist, Five O’Clock Somewhere, on display at Live, Laugh, Labor: Thoughts on Usefulness and Other Myths at The Cleve Carney Museum of Art, 2025.



CGN: Oh, wow.


AC: I was like, this is the epitome of compromise! I had to build a structure so that it could hang that way safely. 

 

CGN: I would say just put it on the ground if that’s what you want to do. It’s interesting that there are still very fixed ideas about the way that art should be displayed.

 

AC: That preparator part of it, that’s what I’m all about. I was having that conversation about what physically supports the work or what conceptually supports it in the way that it’s shown. 

 

CGN: Have you always been a writer? How do your art and writing practices work together? 


AC: I can’t say that I’m a writer, it’s probably the same way that it can feel weird to call yourself an artist. But I feel like I’ve always been relatively good at writing. The first time I ever did any kind of professional writing was contributing, a long time ago, to a website called eHow. The editors would send me a title, and then I would have to research how to do that thing. Then I would write out step-by-step instructions for how to do that. 


I think that’s how I had to make myself think through my conceptual practice—I had to do the research, coagulate that into some kind of document, and then I would have stream-of-consciousness conversations with myself. “Why are we interested in this? Why would we make it this way? What would I want to talk about if someone were to ask me about this?” It’s almost like I was pre-interviewing myself. 


I think the writing is just another way for me to process that idea before I put in all of the time and energy to actually accomplish it. 


CGN: What are you working on right now? What projects do you have coming up?


AC: The biggest project that I have right now is my house. My family and I suffered a major house fire on New Year’s Day. We’ve been displaced since then and are navigating rebuilding our house. It was a total loss. 



Andi Crist, Single-Use Fireplace, 2025. Photo: Mikey Mosher.


 

CGN: I’m so sorry to hear that. 


AC: Thank you. We’re all okay, but it’s been a really tumultuous year. I moved my studio into a storefront last summer, and so most of my, at least relatively recent, work is safe, and I still have all of my materials, but my home life is starting over. I just had my first full year at this space, and it’s got a little gallery built out in the front called Coming Soon. It’s beautiful with floor-to-ceiling windows on Division and Central Park. I’ve been inviting people into the space to try things out.

 

After teaching the ceramics class, I came into a bunch of nice slip casting molds, and I’m making some really playful, weird, ceramic stuff. I want to be open and not put too much pressure on myself. Having a big studio by myself is very expensive, so it’s easy to want to make it feel like it’s worth it. But if for now all I can do is make it a resource for other people, then that will be the thing I do. Be less selfish, but more selfish with my time. Saying I can’t do that, or I don’t want to do that. It’s not my nature to say no—I’m such a yes man. I’m learning how to be a yes man for myself. 


CGN: That makes sense after going through something so traumatic.

 

AC: I have an amazing support system. Our friends started a GoFundMe. It was incredible. I’m so humbled and floored by how held I felt by Chicago. I can’t help but throw a little shout out to my Chicago people. I can see how people’s lives get totally ruined by this kind of tragedy. I feel so lucky. Chicago definitely showed its love back. 


CGN: For your project Coming Soon, are you bringing in other artists?


AC: My philosophy is that I want to be involved as little as possible. I am thinking about it more as a hosted than curated space. I’m actively soliciting proposals or ideas for workshops, meetings, book clubs—I’m down for making it a resource, whatever that means. I don’t want to over-think it, I want it to be an intuitive and organic thing, which is why I call it Coming Soon—it can be a placeholder for anything. It’s exciting. Taking my hands off the reins is a good exercise for me.


andicrist.com



Andi Crist, Extension Cords, Glazed stoneware, chrome, Sizes vary 2021-present. Photo: Mikey Mosher



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Fall offers a full slate of exhibitions across galleries and museums throughout the Midwest. Behind the scenes, many people in the community are working tirelessly to support artists and bring fresh perspectives to the public. We spoke with five insiders about what excites them now and what they anticipate next.


The following preview is one of five conversations that appear in CGN's Fall 2026 magazine. To receive a copy of the print edition click here. 




Debra Kerr – 

CEO, Intuit Art Museum


“Intuit Art Museum’s renovated, expanded spaces give audiences the chance to connect with art through daily art-making, third Thursday Art After Work, group Slow Looks designed to provide a mindful experience with a single work and upcoming conversations with sculptor Bill Brady (Oct. 3) and Dr. Mary Trent (Oct. 15), who curated our current exhibition on the role of scrapbook-making in Henry Darger’s art. 


On view is the thought-provoking Monumental: The Sculpture of Dr. Charles Smith, which encourages guests to consider the lack of historical representation of African Americans and Black people in America. Dr. Smith’s memorials champion Black history and stories of everyday life he sees missing in mainstream narratives. 


This fall we’re opening an exhibition of paintings by Karla Wong, an artist who immigrated from Oaxaca and who explores themes of life and death, gender identity and self-discovery.”


Intuit Art Museum

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