Andrea Carlson: A Constant Sky is the largest exhibition to date of Andrea Carlson’s (b.1979, Lincoln, NE; Grand Portage Ojibwe and European descent) work and was organized by the Denver Art Museum (DAM). For its Sarasota iteration, The Ringling’s curator Ola Wlusek will collaborate with DAM curators and Carlson on a new presentation of the exhibition, building on their shared commitments to Indigenous contemporary art and to reframing institutional collections.

Spanning ten years of Carlson’s practice, A Constant Sky brings together over thirty major works across painting, drawing, sculpture, and video, including several new pieces and a large-scale sculptural installation. The artist creates works that challenge injustices caused by settler narration, using a combination of text, complex visual references to animals, art objects, and items of significant heritage value, which she refers to as “cultural belongings.” Carlson describes the resulting prismatic layers of colorful landscape as “inferred political space.” 

Carlson’s engagement with questions of provenance, display, and cultural displacement through inversions of institutional logics resonate with The Ringling, a collecting museum occupying the ancestral homelands of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, the ancient Calusa, Uzita, and Tocobaga, and other Indigenous peoples. The exhibition will be accompanied by Carlson’s first monograph, featuring new essays by Aruna D’Souza, Heid E. Erdrich, and Dakota Hoska. 

Ola Wlusek is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art and holds a curatorial faculty position at Florida State University. She is a recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship for the development of  Reclaiming Home: Contemporary Seminole Art (2023), The Ringling’s first major exhibition and publication of Native American art. Recently, she was cocurator of Skyway 2024: A Contemporary Collaboration, a triennial of contemporary art from the Tampa Bay area presented across five public art museums in Florida. Wlusek has curated many significant solo exhibitions at The Ringling, including Michele Oka Doner: The True Story of Eve (2023), June Clark: Harlem Quilt (2022), Ya Levy La’ford: American/Rōōts (2021), Howie Tsui: Retainers of Anarchy (2020), and Natasha Mazurka: Order Systems (2019). She also organizes exhibitions from the permanent collection, including EMBODIED: Highlights from The Ringling Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art (2024), among others. Wlusek earned an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College, University of London. 

Dakota Hoska is an enrolled member of the Oglála Lakȟóta Nation, Pine Ridge (Wounded Knee). She currently serves as Curator of Native Arts at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC). Formerly Associate Curator of Native Arts at the Denver Art Museum, Hoska previously worked as a Curatorial Research Assistant at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, supporting the exhibition Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists (2019). Hoska completed her MA in Art History with a focus on Native American art history, in 2019 at the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul), and received her BFA in Drawing and Painting from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2012. 

John P. Lukavic, PhD, serves as the Andrew W. Mellon Curator and department head of Native Arts at the Denver Art Museum, overseeing the Arts of Africa, Arts of Oceania, and Indigenous Arts of North America collections. Lukavic developed the exhibitions Kent Monkman: History is Painted By the Victors (2025), Each/Other: Marie Watt and Cannupa Hanska Luger (2021), Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer (2018), and Super Indian: Fritz Scholder, 1967–1980 (2015). He served as lead curator for the reinstallation of the Indigenous Arts of North America collection. Lukavic received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology (2012) and BA in Anthropology (1999) from the University of Oklahoma, and his MA in Museum Science from Texas Tech University (2001). He serves as Vice President of the Native American Art Studies Association and sits on the board of the Denver Indian Center, Inc.

Olivia Amaya Ortiz, 516 Arts