Highpoint Editions Heads to IFPDA Print Fair 2025

Join us from March 27 through March 30 at the Park Avenue Armory for the 2025 IFPSDA Print Fair! Highpoint Editions is delighted to present a selection of new editions by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Julie Mehretu, Andrea Carlson, Leslie Barlow, and Seitu Ken Jones.

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IFPDA Print Fair 2025

LOCATION

Park Avenue Armory 643 Park Avenue, New York, NY

VIP PREVIEW

Thursday, March 27, 5-9 pm

PUBLIC HOURS

Friday, March 28, 11 am - 7 pm

Saturday, March 29, 11 am - 7 pm

Sunday, March 30, 11 am - 5 pm

MORE INFORMATION

FineArtPrintFair.org

Images of IFPDA Fair by Annie Forrest

Rolling Head by Andrea Carlson

Rolling Head

Andrea Carlson, 2025

22-run screenprint on Coventry Rag paper

Edition of 20

36 ¼ x 48 ½ in.

Click here for availability or Email our Gallery Director Alex Blaisdell alex@highpointprintmaking.org

Highpoint Editions is pleased to release Rolling Head, a new screenprint by Minnesota-based artist Andrea Carlson. This 22-run screenprint is Carlson’s third print with Highpoint Editions and touches on stories of misogyny and its pervasiveness within indigenous narratives, art history, and mythology.

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About Rolling Head

Andrea Carlson unmoors images to confront and reframe history as a battle for land and the ways it is imagined. In her densely layered prints, visual referents move across turbulent landscapes organized by the consistent horizon line of Lake Superior. Imagery, including mica hand and talon forms from ancient Woodland earthworks, horses and cowboys, masks from the 1962 film Mondo Cane, bent land marker trees, Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks project, and more fills these prints to draw attention to histories of erasure and dispossession.

Andrea Carlson’s other prints with Highpoint Editions - Anti-Retro (2018) and Exit (2019)

Her new print, Rolling Head, references a common figure in Woodlands and Plains narratives, “Rolling Head,” said to be the roving head of a woman decapitated by her husband for infidelity in one of the first acts of domestic violence on Turtle Island. Her head continues to roll through the world, chasing her children, either out of a cannibalistic hunger to consume them or, in some tellings, to be with them in an act of endless love. Carlson places two headless female forms—the Niké of Samothrace and the blue imprint of a woman’s nude body from Yves Klein’s Anthropométries series (1960)—in front of a roiling lake waters, and two woodpeckers, the bird that in the version of the story recounted to Carlson was the adulterous partner of Rolling Head, fly forth as if emerging from their necks. The textual reference to Orion at the center of the print, another mythical perpetrator of sexual violence against women nonetheless heroized in the stars, notes that even the sky is full of imagined misogynists and that the origins of such narratives of violence against women can be located anywhere, even as they endlessly follow Indigenous communities into the present.

–Statement by Christopher T. Green, adapted from the exhibition “The sky loves to hear me sing: Woodland Art in Transmotion” on view September 12 – October 29, 2024, The List Gallery at Swarthmore College. An early trial proof of Rolling Head was on display in the exhibition. Read the larger statement from Christopher T. Green here.

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Andrea Carlson painting a film over a test print.

Since her first print with Highpoint Editions in 2018, Andrea Carlson has taken to the process of screenprinting naturally. The artist hand-painted each large film separation prior to handing them off to the printers to expose onto screens and painstakingly chose each color to infuse the composition with energetic tension and brilliant intensity. Carlson and the Highpoint Editions team evaluated each layer’s color to ensure the finished print communicated her vision as she intended.

Like her paintings, Carlson’s prints are densely layered with reference and pattern –commenting on the tactics of colonialism as well as her family and peers, Ojibwe culture, and Indigenous sovereignty. Rolling Head creates a whirlpool of dialogue amongst vivid hues and stunning line-work.

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Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe/European descent, b. 1979) is a visual artist working in northern Minnesota. Carlson works primarily on paper, creating painted and drawn surfaces with many mediums. Her work addresses land and institutional spaces, decolonization narratives, and assimilation metaphors in film. Her work has been acquired by institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Walker Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The British Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada.

Carlson has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including those awarded by the Carolyn Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, The LeRoy Neiman and Janet Byrne Neiman Foundation, the United States Artists Fellowship, and the McKnight Foundation. Carlson has exhibited in Canada and has had solo exhibitions at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, La Centrale at the Powerhouse (Montreal, QC), and the Plains Art Museum (Fargo, ND), among others. In addition to the many reviews and articles on her work, Carlson has worked as a writer and curator, and is an accomplished lecturer.

For availability and to purchase Rolling Head, email our Gallery Director Alex Blaisdell alex@highpointprintmaking.org

On Rolling Head, Essay by Christopher T. Green

Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe/European descent, b. 1979) recontextualizes images to confront and reframe history as a battle for land and the ways it is imagined. Her paintings and prints reproduce seemingly disparate images, objects, and textual references across recurring horizons and shorelines. Her referents meander through these visual territories as roving characters inquiring into the tension between forced colonial absence and the deeply etched presence of a land base.

In densely layered prints, such as Exit (2018) and Anti-Retro (2018) pictured above, visual referents move across these turbulent landscapes. Diverse images—including mica hand and talon forms disinterred from ancient Woodland earthworks; horses and cowboys; masks from the 1962 exploitive documentary film, Mondo Cane; shells such as miigis; bent land-marker trees; and Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks project—fill these prints to draw attention to histories of erasure and dispossession. Many of the objects and references evoke the movements of stories and migrations across ancestral territories; others recall the violence against Indigenous communities inherent in Western films, as in Anti-Retro, or the destruction to Indigenous monuments and earthworks through the construction of highways like I-94, as in Exit. Throughout, Carlson examines the settler impulse to erase past histories in order to make long-inhabited land appear otherwise unoccupied when taken over, redeveloped, and consumed.

Carlson’s works are frequently organized around a consistent horizon line. Some of these landscapes are based on the Lake Superior shoreline and her home in northern Minnesota, Gichi Bitobig, or “Great Double Bay,” in Ojibwemowin, also known as Grand Marais. Other landscapes are imaginary. Her play of shifting, layered imagery unfolds to the viewer over time. She builds her compositions gradually through multiple layers, evoking temporal and geological strata. “Land changes, it has to change,” Carlson declares, and her prints contain not only symmetries but also resplendent variety, shifting “like the wake behind a boat or waves on a lake.” ¹ The prints organize space but also break up static and stereotypical depictions of land, peoples, and cultures. The shining mica hands in Exit, for example, printed with a pigment that contains mica silicate dust, are held up as if to indicate “STOP.” Pictorially, they interrupt the linear recession into the horizon line and deny the viewer easy entry into the visual space, suggesting these layered landscapes require permission, or at least contemplation, to access.

For Carlson, printmaking is a medium that can be responsive to the fear of the loss of land, life, and livelihood that undergirds Indigenous communities. In their seriality and multiplicity, prints are resilient to loss and counteract historic attempts at dispossession and erasure. ² As she recently described for the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, “I use the iteration to give it some movement, to give it a multiple existence in the same space. You can't hold it all in your head at the same time. You are forced to make decisions with what you are looking at in a way where you are not able to possess it all at once.” ³ Her landscapes are thus what scholar Kate Morris describes as “anti-invitational”—layered with imagery that is neither easily digestible nor accessible to occupation by the viewer. ⁴ Indeed, not only do the prints unfold over time, but Carlson sometimes embeds private communal meanings within her work, intended only for insiders.

In her new print Rolling Head (2025), Carlson references a figure common to Woodlands and Plains narratives, a woman from the early history of the world known as “Rolling Head,” who was one of the first victims of domestic violence on Turtle Island. After being discovered committing infidelities with a snake or, in the Ojibwe version of the story that Carlson knows, a woodpecker, the woman is decapitated by her husband. Her head continues to roll through the world, chasing her children, either to be with them in an act of endless love or, in some tellings, out of a cannibalistic hunger to consume them.

Two headless female forms fill the center of the print in front of turbulent lake waters: the Niké of Samothrace and the blue imprint of a woman’s nude body from Yves Klein’s Anthropométries series (1960), a “living paintbrush.” The bodies frame the name “ROLLING HEAD” and the words “Orion just outside my window” at the center of the print. The textual reference to the Orion constellation, named another mythical perpetrator of sexual violence against women nonetheless heroized in the stars, notes that even the sky is full of imagined misogynists. ⁵ Carlson thus deploys varied imagery to show that the origins of such narratives of violence against women can be located anywhere, even as they follow Indigenous communities into the present. Yet two woodpeckers also fly forth from the bodies as if emerging from their necks. Ecologically, woodpeckers are known as healers for their ability to quickly and efficiently clear invasive insects from stands of trees. Here, their wings echo those of Niké and the out-flung arms of the headless blue Anthropométrie, suggesting the possibility of freedom or an escape from such cycles of violence.

In prints like Rolling Head, Carlson is thus engaged in a form of storytelling that takes place across narrative and temporal space, moving through cultural referents to find a shared language. Her approach to visual space and itinerant art historical motifs match pictorial and narrative movement. As Vizenor notes, “Carlson creates great layers of conceptual scenes, silhouettes of cultural absence and presence, and converted landscapes of time, space, and course of memories.” ⁶ Images are redeployed to new memorial functions as their place in such narratives shift conceptual positions. Thus, the shifting nature of Carlson’s visual treatment of images and their layers are, as she describes, "alive and ever-changing or ever shimmering.”⁷

–Excerpt from Christopher T. Green, “Woodland Native Art in Transmotion,” in The sky loves to hear me sing: Woodland Art in Transmotion, Christopher T. Green, ed., exhibition catalog produced in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name on view September 12 – October 29, 2024 at The List Gallery at Swarthmore College. Courtesy of the author. An early trial proof of Rolling Head was on display in this exhibition.

 1. Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, “Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons,” 2024, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 4:57, https://vimeo.com/994132402.

2. Andrea Carlson, communication with the author, November 29, 2023.

3. Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, “Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons.”

4. Kate Morris, Shifting Ground: Landscape in Contemporary Native Art (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019).

 5. Andrea Carlson, communication with the author, August 9, 2024.

6. Vizenor, “Native Art and Visionary Motion: Rock Art Shamans, Cubism, and Expressionism,” in Christopher T. Green, ed., The sky loves to hear me sing: Woodland Art in Transmotion (Swarthmore, PA: The List Gallery, Swarthmore College, 2024), 27.

7. Noah Berlatsky, “How Artist Andrea Carlson Heals Landscapes By Dismantling and Reassembling Them,” Observer, August 13, 2024, https://observer.com/2024/08/interview-artist-andrea-carlson-shimmer-on-horizon-mca-chicago/.

Christopher T. Green is a writer and scholar whose research, curating, and teaching focus on modern and contemporary art, Native North American art and material culture, and the interrelation of Indigeneity, primitivism, and Euro-American art within global histories of modernism. He recently curated “Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art” (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, April 13-September 30 2024) and “The sky loves to hear me sing: Woodland Art in Transmotion” (List Gallery, Swarthmore College, September 12-October 29 2024). He received his PhD in Art History from the CUNY Graduate Center, and currently serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History and Environmental Studies at Swarthmore College.

Rolling Head

Andrea Carlson, 2025

22-run screenprint on Coventry Rag paper

Edition of 20

36 ¼ x 48 ½ in.

Click here for availability or Email our Gallery Director Alex Blaisdell alex@highpointprintmaking.org

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Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe/European descent, b. 1979) is a visual artist working in northern Minnesota. Carlson works primarily on paper, creating painted and drawn surfaces with many mediums. Her work addresses land and institutional spaces, decolonization narratives, and assimilation metaphors in film. Her work has been acquired by institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Walker Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The British Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada.

Carlson has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including those awarded by the Carolyn Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, The LeRoy Neiman and Janet Byrne Neiman Foundation, the United States Artists Fellowship, and the McKnight Foundation. Carlson has exhibited in Canada and has had solo exhibitions at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, La Centrale at the Powerhouse (Montreal, QC), and the Plains Art Museum (Fargo, ND), among others. In addition to the many reviews and articles on her work, Carlson has worked as a writer and curator, and is an accomplished lecturer.

For availability and to purchase Rolling Head, email our Gallery Director Alex Blaisdell alex@highpointprintmaking.org

Andrea Carlson to Exhibit at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Andrea Carlson will be presenting an exhibition titled Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago from August 3, 2024 through February 2, 2025. Andrea Carlson is the 26th artist to participate in Chicago Works, a solo exhibition series at the MCA that features artists who are shaping contemporary art in the city and beyond. The exhibition is presented in the MCA’s Turner Gallery, on the museum’s fourth floor.

Andrea Carlson (b. 1979, Ojibwe/European descent; 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 holds memories of colonial expansion and violence, 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 histories of erasure and dispossession, Carlson proposes that what appears to be lost can be remade, reimagined, or otherwise regained.

Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons is curated by Iris Colburn, Curatorial Associate.

Learn more about the exhibition here!

Marking Resilience: Indigenous North American Prints at MFA Boston

Check out this exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston! Marking Resilience: Indigenous North American Prints is on view from November 4, 2023 through March 17, 2024 and features Highpoint Editions work by Dyani White Hawk, Julie Buffalohead, and Andrea Carlson!

Resilience often manifests in work by Indigenous North American artists, for example in its content or simply by increasing visibility to combat erasure in representation. Some Native artists have used the collaborative medium of printmaking as a way of reclaiming their histories and addressing the challenges their communities face today.

Check out MFA Boston’s website for more information and additional programming.

Creative Capital 2024 Awards Granted to Highpoint Editions Artists

Congratulations to both Highpoint Editions Artists Andrea Carlson and Dyani White Hawk on their Creative Capital 2024 Awards!

Creative Capital announced their 2024 “Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact” Awards in Visual Arts and Film/Moving Image, totaling $2.5 million in grants to artists for the creation of 50 groundbreaking new works. Chosen via a democratic process of external peer review out of 5,600 applications, these 28 successful visual arts project proposals and 22 film/moving image project proposals, representing 54 artists in total, were awarded on the basis of their innovative new approaches to painting, drawing, sculpture, public art, video art, architecture and design, printmaking, installation, documentary film, experimental film, narrative film, and socially engaged forms. The Creative Capital Award provides each individual artist with unrestricted project funding up to $50,000, which can be drawn down over a multi-year period, bespoke professional development services, and community-building opportunities.

Read more about the Creative Capital Awards here!