Welcome to Session Seven

Our study in this Session focusses on the special relationship that Indigenous people have with the land. It means being stewards of the land, rather than owners. It also means  respecting and protecting the national environment through practices  deeply connected to one' ancestral knowledge and relationships.

Yasmine Vera (he/him/they/them), Education Coordinator and Executive Assistant, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University will be joining our class to discuss with us about some of the Indigenous Art work which Rose has in its Collection.

Andrea Carlson, Perpetual Genre, 2024. Oil, acrylic, gouache, ink, color pencil, and graphite on paper; overall: 45.5 × 61 in. 

"Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe/European descent, b. 1979; based in northern Minnesota and Chicago, IL) considers how landscapes are shaped by history, relationships, and power. Her artworks imagine places that are “everywhere and nowhere,” visualizing these shifting yet ever-present dynamics. Grounded in Anishinaabe understandings of space and time, the works in this exhibition reflect on how land carries memories of colonial expansion and violence, as well as Indigenous presence and resistance.

"Across painting, video, and sculpture, Carlson organizes imagined landscapes around one constant—the horizon. This line is reminiscent of her homelands on Lake Superior. It is also a significant art historical trope that artists have employed to depict territories as vast and vacant, ripe for the taking. Carlson’s prismatic works are not empty: they are densely layered with an abundance of motifs, making reference to the tactics of colonialism as well as her family and peers, Ojibwe culture, and Indigenous sovereignty. Confronting ongoing histories of erasure and dispossession, Carlson proposes that what appears to be lost can be remade, reimagined, otherwise regained." 1/1/24, 9:23 PM Chicago Works | Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons - MCA Chicago, Chicago Works, Aug 03, 2024 - Feb 02, 2025 

Andrea Carlson, Red Exit, 2020,  Oil, watercolor, opaque watercolor, ink, acrylic, colored pencil, ball-point pen, fiber-tipped pen, and graphite on paper, 60 parts, Overall (In-situ): 115 × 183 in. 

 "Andrea Carlson (b. 1979) presents a panoramic seascape informed by ideas of re-creation and renewal. Vibrant, prismatic motifs—some drawn from the land of the artist’s ancestral home, and others from effigies, petroglyphs, and navigational signs—pulsate and collide across a series of horizons. The composition is anchored by a loon, known in the Ojibwe re-creation narrative as an Earth-Diver, who alongside other surviving animals, helps remake the world.. Through her images, which take shape as a continuous wake pattern, she invokes moments of resistance and empowerment. Symbols of Native advocacy come together in a gesture of reclamation, creating new narratives of Indigenous experience in North America. While Red Exit confronts the ongoing erasure of Indigenous cultures, it is, in the artist's words, a celebration of “the place we (Native People) reserve for ourselves . . . places of joy amidst removal, exclusion, and attempted assimilation.” 

The composition is anchored by a loon, known in the Ojibwe re-creation narrative as a Earth-Diver, who alongside other surviving animals, helps remake the world. Carlson also incorporates the infinity sign from the flag of the Métis People and the silhouetted figure of “Man Mound,” a destroyed earthwork—fractured by a road—that appears here to rise up from the land. Through her images, which take shape as a continuous wake pattern, she invokes moments of resistance and empowerment. Symbols of Native advocacy come together in a gesture of reclamation, creating new narratives of Indigenous experience in North America. While Red Exit confronts the ongoing erasure of Indigenous cultures, it is, in the artist's words, a celebration of “the place we (Native People) reserve for ourselves . . . places of joy amidst removal, exclusion, and attempted assimilation. Alongside prints and multidisciplinary projects, Carlson primarily makes large-scale, multi-part works on paper through a combination of drawing and painting. Highly intricate and graphic, these compositions coalesce into expansive, disorienting scenes that often evoke futuristic and, at times, apocalyptic worlds.  Whitney Museum of American Art. 

From Andy Warhol