During the 1970s, she was a pioneer of the "Pattern and Decoration" group in New York City, in which the Feminist movement played an important role.
Mainly a painter, her work has evolved within a number of different stylistic concerns including installation, sculpture, and public art commissions.
Carlson's career has included nine solo museum exhibitions: Homage to the Academy Building,[2] Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1979), Philadelphia, PA; Insideout Oberlin,[3] Allen Memorial Museum (1980), Oberlin, OH; Eastlake Then and Now,[4] Hudson River Museum (1981), Yorkers, NY; Four False Facades,[5] Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (1981), Winston-Salem, NC; Currents,[6] Milwaukee Art Museum (1982), Milwaukee, WI; Picture That In Miami,[7] Lowe Art Museum (1982), Coral Gables, FL; The Monument Series,[8] Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Queens Museum,[9] Flushing, NY; and The Dog Show,[10] Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY, NY and forty-seven one person gallery exhibitions in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York, including Hundred Acres Gallery[11] (1975), New York, NY; The Gingerbread House,[12] Graduate Center (1977), CUNY, NY; Pam Adler Gallery[13] (1979, 1981, 1983), New York, NY; Vietnam: Sorry About That,[14] University Art Galleries, Wright State University (1988), Dayton, OH; and Freedman Gallery[15] (1989), Albright College, Reading, PA; Over Time,[16] Essex Flowers Gallery (2018), New York, NY.
Her work was included in numerous group exhibitions and biennials in museums and galleries in North America and Europe, including Twenty-Six Contemporary Women Artists,[17] Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (1971), Ridgefield, CN, curated by Lucy Lippard; Extraordinary Realities,[18] Whitney Museum of American Art (1973), New York, NY, curated by Robert M. Doty; Pattern Painting,[19] P.S.1 (1977), Long Island City, NY; Contemporary Women: Consciousness & Content,[20] Brooklyn Museum (1977), NY, curated by Joan Semmel; Rooms,[21] Hayden Gallery (1981), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
In the early 1970s, for several years, she traveled throughout the United States documenting Environmental Folk Art[31] lectured extensively on the material.