Michele Carlson uses creative strategies to question systems of power and legacies of racialization. She is a visual artist, writer, educator, and facilitator of projects ranging from conversations to publications to occasional curatorial endeavors. Her work is as much about how we create and endure systems of power as how we can refuse and reform them through creative imagining and action.

Carlson fostered her multidisciplinary practice at the University of Washington, where she received a BFA in printmaking, BA in interdisciplinary visual arts, and BA in history. Her making and writing practice was further developed at the California College of the Arts, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she earned an MFA in printmaking and an MA in visual and critical studies.

In her visual works on paper, which have been exhibited and supported nationally, Carlson often uses speculative, imaginative strategies to explore how humans engage collectively and impact one another. As a writer, she uses various writing styles to process the ways visual and material cultures reflect the lived experiences of diverse social groups. Her critical writings on art and culture have been published by Art in America, KQED, and Afterimage and include numerous catalogue essays and book chapters. She is currently working on a hybrid memoir titled The Visits, which examines the visual culture of incarceration as a means to explore constructions of kinship and family. This project has recently been supported by the Maryland State Arts Council, the San Leandro Arts Council, and Montalvo Center for the Arts.

Her broader practice demonstrates a commitment to amplifying underrepresented voices through curatorial work, editorial direction and publishing, and leadership positions. From 2016 to 2019, Carlson was the executive director of Art Practical, a West Coast arts media organization that produced art writing, books, events, and podcasts about contemporary art. From 2011 to 2016, she served on various editorial and leadership teams, including as editor in chief of Hyphen, a media outlet for Asian American culture and politics.

She is a founding member of Related Tactics, an artistic collective that makes art at the intersection of race and culture. Related Tactics prioritizes the thoughtful and care-full consensus required to conduct the relational work of social change and movement building. Lately their work has focused on the ways that artists of color negotiate and reimagine fraught histories of racialized labor and nation building in the United States. Their work spans many forms, from photography and expanded printmaking to conversations and space-making. Related Tactics’ projects have recently been supported by the Center for Craft, Ruth Foundation for the Arts, Kala Art Institute, and Wexner Arts Center.

From 2016 to 2019 she was as an associate professor of visual and critical studies at California College of the Arts, where she taught across the fields of critical theory and studio arts. She currently teaches at George Washington University as an associate professor of printmaking.