Untamed, by Carla Stetson

March 28 to May 16, 2026

Carla Stetson makes work across disciplines, from densely-detailed drawings and mixed-media works, to paper sculptures and installations. Her work evokes feelings of resilience and abundance. It conveys the intricacy and importance of the natural realm, entangled as it is with human lives, in fascinating, complex and necessary ways.

Stetson’s work evolves in series, and she brings two of these bodies of work to the Cayuga Museum and Schweinfurth Art Center in a joint exhibition. Wild animals are the primary protagonists in the drawings and paper sculptures exhibited in the Cayuga Museum, occupying chairs, nesting on furniture or coiled on braided rugs. Within each work narratives arise, psychoses are explored, and power struggles ensue. These works are both playful and metaphors for social and political concerns.

At the Schweinfurth Art Center, Stetson’s recent mixed-media works are influenced by fluid dynamics; the study of the winding and spiraling movement of water. The Nomadic River is a cartographic fabric collage that traces the Mississippi River’s meander belt, based on a detailed map of historic Mississippi riverbeds made in the 1940s. The mixed media pieces take the motif of a braided rug, but animate the braids. They separate, becoming unwoven, entangled or knotted, and snake around in the space.  Each braid weaves together images from the natural world in combination with scraps and bits of fabric and ephemera from Stetson’s collections. This work seems to mirror the way one makes sense of a life- memories are combined until a pattern starts to emerge, only to have events take us in unexpected directions, unplanned and untamed.

About the artist

Carla Stetson is a visual artist currently living and working in a barn built in 1840 that she converted into her studio and home on four acres near Ithaca, New York. It is also home to Sky Barn Apiaries. Her work explores the tangled interrelationships between the wild and human in mixed media drawings, prints and collage.

Stetson received a Bachelor in Fine Arts degree in sculpture from the Kansas City Art Institute and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Vermont College. She was an Associate Professor of Art at Ithaca College in New York and now works full time in her studio. Previously, she lived in Duluth, Minnesota, where she is best known for public sculpture, especially the Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial, the first large scale memorial to victims of a lynching in the United States.

Stetson’s residency awards include Draw International in France; McColl Center for the Arts in Charlotte, North Carolina; Saltonstall Foundation in New York; and the Jentel Foundation in Wyoming. She has received fellowships and grants from the Puffin Foundation, Intermedia Arts, Arrowhead Regional Arts Council, the Minnesota State Arts Board and Ithaca College. Her work is included in several collections, including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Tweed Museum of Art in Duluth, Minnesota, the City of Duluth, and Carolinas Health Care in Charlotte, North Carolina, the University of Minnesota and the St. Louis County Historical Association.