Contemporary Painting

Andrea Carlson (b. 1979) is a visual artist currently living in Chicago, Illinois. Through painting and drawing, Carlson cites entangled cultural narratives and institutional authority relating to objects based on the merit of possession and display. Current research activities include Indigenous Futurism and assimilation metaphors in film. Her work has been acquired by institutions such as the British Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada. Carlson hold an MFA from MCAD. She was a 2008 McKnight Fellow and a 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors grant recipient. In 2020, Carlson helped form the Center for Native Futures, the only Native art center in Chicago.

My thesis is a series of portrait paintings representing individual stories within Latin-American communities that show commonalities and diversities embodied by cultures that fall under the umbrella of Latinex. My paintings serve as a visual index illustrating hybridity within the Latinex community in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I interviewed Latinex individuals within my community and painted their portraits utilizing various techniques that speak to the hybrid identity of the sitter and of myself. My ethnicity, an American Latino, is a major driving force in painting portraits of Latinex individuals from my community. Through my exploration I am not only getting to know the subject I am painting, I am learning more about myself and how I fit within the Latin community.