10 OCTOBER 9-15, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | On the Horizon A CONSTANT SKY BY ANDREA CARLSON IS NOW ON VIEW AT THE DENVER ART MUSEUM. BY KRISTEN FIORE A Constant Sky is appropriately named: The latest exhibition at the Denver Art Museum is an endless vista of imagery, colors and themes. A quick walk through the gallery of color- ful artwork by Andrea Carlson (made from the mixed mediums of oil paint, acrylic paint, gouache, colored pencil, watercolor and ink) is like going outside, looking up at the sky and spinning around until you get so dizzy you collapse in the grass. The larger works comprise smaller paper pieces that line up to form a continuous horizon over a body of water that washes up metaphors for motifs like access, denial, power and possession. Carlson’s work is full of cultural critique and theory, but the more personal “Ancestor and Descendant” might be her favorite piece in the show. “I feel like I put a lot of myself in it,” she says. “...That one has much more of my kinship in it.” But Carlson’s kinship is everywhere in the exhibit on Level 1 of the DAM’s Hamilton Building, from her interest in fi lm to her connection with the ever-changing mood of Lake Superior, which she lives off of in northern Minnesota. The artist is a descen- dant of the Grand Portage band of Ojibwe as well as European settlers, and her work challenges injustices created by settler narration through references to text, ani- mals, art objects and cultural belongings. Carlson’s work is collected by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Canada, the Walker Art Center and more. A Constant Sky, which opened October 5 and will stay through February 16 in the gal- lery formerly occupied by Kent Monkman’s History is Painted by the Victors, features thirty works — the most comprehen- sive show of Carlson’s art yet. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to see this much of my work in one place again, because it is work on paper and is very fragile and hard to get out into one place,” Carlson says. “It’s such an incredible privilege for me to be here in this space and have all the work together.” The show is one of the fi nal pieces of the DAM’s 100th anniversary celebration of its Indigenous Arts of North America collection. At the beginning of the year, the museum opened Sustained, an exhibition created collaboratively with Indigenous community members about things like family, beauty and humor, which have sustained the community over the past century. Monkman’s show was the largest exhi- bition of Indigenous art at the DAM out- side of its permanent Indigenous gallery. The museum recently held its 36th annual Friendship Powwow, which was the fi rst new program created after SCFD passed; at the end of October, the museum will host its Triennial Symposium for Native Arts, where Andrew W. Mellon curator of Native Arts John Lukavic says diverse voices will help set the tone for the next 100 years. The DAM’s collection is one of the larg- est accumulations of Indigenous art in the world — while most museums in the 1920s were prioritizing European art, the DAM set itself apart by acknowledging the cultural and artistic signifi cance of North American Indigenous communities. The museum con- tinued collecting contemporary Indigenous art through the decades, unlike other institu- tions, which frequently regarded Indigenous art as artifacts or ethnographic objects. During opening remarks at a preview for A Constant Sky, Christoph Heinrich, the DAM’s Frederick and Jan Mayer director, said that it makes sense to end the year with a contemporary exhibit — not artifacts, but living, breathing work. “Some aspects of it get us to look at the intersection of time and space,” Lukavic says of Carlson’s art. “You think of a fi lm reel on a cell, if each cell were a landscape, and that landscape slowly morphs and changes as you go from cell to cell. She is rendering time and space in a two-dimensional medium.” Carlson’s cinematic infl uences are also films themselves. In A Constant Sky, the “VORE” series references fi lms of the Ital- ian cannibal boom genre of the 1980s, where colonizers would come to Indigenous land in places like Africa or South America and do something horrendous to the local popu- lation. “And the fi lms end with the native folks cannibalizing the foreign colonizer,” Carlson says. “These were fantasies. They were hor- rors, but they still were fantasies that were feeding a colonial nar- rative of fear of the other.” The “VORE” series metaphorically connects these horror fi lms to the Wiindigo, an insatiable can- nibal fi gure found in Anishi- naabe storytelling, calling the movies out. Carlson’s art calls out mu- seums and repatriation, too, with paintings relating to the consumption and greed of colo- nization as well as museums’ collecting practices and narra- tives of possession and owner- ship. In “The Constant Sky,” a commissioned work for the DAM, Indigenous and Western artifacts clash in a stormy body of water where phrases like “Removed From Public View” and “Feckless Curators” line up in the middle. “She uses items from Western culture as surrogates for cultural belongings that don’t belong in a museum that maybe have been or should be restituted to communities, or that are off view and in storage, because maybe they’re culturally sensitive and shouldn’t be seen, and you’re questioning whether they should even be in a museum in the fi rst place,” Lukavic explains. “...It’s getting us to all be very refl ective on the way you think of and approach things that you fi nd in museums.” “In this piece, I’m thinking more about deep time, legacies and things that keep pushing themselves forward that we have the power to end,” Carlson says. As a member of the Illinois State Museum Board, Carlson fought to have 6,000 ances- tors in the state’s collection repatriated. “Those were really hard meetings,” she says. “I was challenged, I cried at board meetings, I wrote letters. It was very hard. They’re in the process of repatriating the ancestors there. It’s hard, emotional labor, but I have access to these institutions and these spaces, knowing there is a fraught history.” Her art comments on access, as well. In two different locations, “Columns for a Ho- rizon,” wooden sculptures displayed in front of the art, give visitors a different viewing experience. “Imagine you’re driving down a road right along a beautiful landscape, but there’s always these trees that are in the way, and they’re kind of fl ickering as you go by,” Lukavic CULTURE continued on page 12 KEEP UP ON DENVER ARTS AND CULTURE AT WESTWORD.COM/ARTS “Cannibal Ferox” by Andrea Carlson. DENVER ART MUSEUM “The Constant Sky” by Andrea Carlson is a commissioned work for the Denver Art Museum. KRISTEN FIORE
