Artist Andrea Carlson Reflects on Three Years of Future Cache at UMMA

As UMMA’s exhibition Andrea Carlson: Future Cache prepares to close on November 30, 2025, visitors have a few final weeks to spend time with artist Andrea Carlson’s reflections on land, memory, and belonging. Installed in 2022 and spanning three floors in UMMA’s Vertical Gallery, this solo exhibition commemorates the Cheboiganing (Burt Lake) Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, who were violently burned out from their land in Northern Michigan on October 15, 1900.

Carlson describes her practice as open to interpretation. “My work is pretty abstract,” she says. “Visual art can be more about feeling, about what images bring to mind and the associations viewers might have. As an artist, I cannot control the interpretation. That belongs to the viewer.” Her work in Future Cache invites visitors to sit with that openness while considering the histories connected to the land the University of Michigan occupies.

Landscape, for Carlson, is not simply scenery. “All of my work is landscape,” she explains. “It references the land, and my work is committed to paper. If you think about how land was taken away, it happened on paper. It was abstracted on paper. Land on the paper could then be bought and sold, and that same material space can also imagine land back.”

She also speaks to what’s at stake for students and community members who encounter this history. “Young people come to this place (UMMA) to find truth, to find meaning, to find knowledge,” she notes, emphasizing the need for honesty in acknowledging the past.

The closing of Future Cache was celebrated at the most recent Feel Good Friday: Feel Good Frybread on November 14, where Andrea Carlson, along with Debra Yepa-Pappan and Frank Waln, led a talk titled “Native Arts and Cultural Keeping.” The event included a special invitation for members of the Burt Lake Band to come together to celebrate and commemorate the exhibition’s long run at UMMA. In describing the project, Carlson framed Future Cache as “a love letter to the Burt Lake Band,” highlighting the exhibition as both a tribute and a call to remembrance.

The exhibition is open until Nov 30, 2025. Free admission and open to the public.