Denver Art Museum proudly presents Andrea Carlson’s first museum survey, A Constant Sky

DENVER – August 26, 2025 - The Denver Art Museum (DAM) proudly presents mixed-media visual artist Andrea Carlson’s first museum survey, Andrea Carlson: A Constant Sky. The exhibition features 30 works which are on view from Oct. 5, 2025, through Feb. 16, 2026, on level one of the museum’s Hamilton Building. Carlson (descended from Grand Portage Ojibwe and European settlers, b. 1979) creates works that challenge injustices caused by settler narration, while utilizing a combination of text and complex visual references to animals, art objects and cultural belongings. These elements are organized in prismatic layers of colorful landscape, which the artist views as “inferred political space.”

Carlson’s practice challenges assumed hierarchies, considers who holds the right of possession and how power is retained through objects such as paintings. Her works challenge visitors’ perspectives and inspire questions about permission and refusal through carefully and beautifully painted objects in compositions that are visually and emotionally complex.

“The DAM has now been collecting Indigenous arts for 100 years, always with an emphasis on current expressions and with A Constant Sky, the DAM’s future is bright with a powerful Indigenous voice in the driver seat,” said Christoph Heinrich, Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the Denver Art Museum.

“Andrea Carlson is a daring artist who questions colonial legacies and cultural consumption through her paintings and artworks. Her imagery is upfront and confrontational, often impeding our view of the horizon that lies beyond and commanding a position of power. This approach asks us to think about objects and the stories we place upon them,” said Dakota Hoska, former Associate Curator of Native Arts at DAM, now the Curator of Native Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

“Over the past 100 years, DAM has focused on featuring Indigenous arts as part of diverse, thriving and living cultures. A Constant Sky sets the tone for the next 100 years, centering the theme of reclamation and subverting Eurocentric standards,” said John Lukavic, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Native Arts at DAM.

Known for her intricate, colorful works drawn and painted with many different mediums, Carlson recently expanded her practice to include sculpture. The DAM commissioned Columns for a Horizon, a large-scale sculptural work which consists of individual wooden poles of varying lengths. This sculpture, when placed in front of Carlson’s painted works, denies entry into her imagined landscapes and encourages viewers to contemplate ideas of access and denial. The exhibition will also highlight three large-scale paintings presented together for the first time—as the artist originally intended them to be shown.

With 20,000 sq. ft. of permanent gallery space in its Lanny and Sharon Martin Building, dedicated to showing Indigenous Arts of North America, the DAM is proud to be one of the foremost foundational arts spaces to showcase Indigenous visual cultures for the past century. The DAM looks forward to the next 100 years filled with collaboration and remains steadfastly committed to maintaining a collection of leading contemporary artists while working respectfully and collaboratively, centering presentations and stories of artists.

A Constant Sky is organized by the Denver Art Museum. It is presented with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Christensen Fund, the donors to the Annual Fund Leadership Campaign, and the residents who support the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD). Promotional support is provided by 5280 Magazine and CBS Colorado.