For the 2025 edition of Dallas Art Fair, Hales is pleased to present a selection of works by Jordan Ann Craig, Martyn Cross, Haroun Hayward, Virginia Jaramillo, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Rob Lyon, Ebony G. Patterson, and Kay WalkingStick. The presentation features a selection of historic and contemporary works, reflecting the programming and vision of the gallery.
Jordan Ann Craig (b. 1992 San Jose, CA, USA) lives and works in Pojoaque Valley, New Mexico. Craig is a Northern Cheyenne artist known for vibrant and often densely composed paintings which are characterized by a dynamic exploration and interpretation of Northern Cheyenne and Cheyenne visual culture. Incorporating vivid colors, recurring patterns, and interwoven forms situated in grids, Craig’s work explores and celebrates her Native ancestry, posing questions about the languages of modern abstract painting and the relationship to both historic and contemporary indigenous culture. Craig’s largest solo exhibition to date, it takes a long time to stay here: Paintings by Jordan Ann Craig, at the Block Museum of Art, Evanston, IL is currently on view through 13 April. Her solo exhibition, My Way Home, is on view at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM through 29 June.
Martyn Cross (b. 1975, Yate, UK) lives and works in Bristol, UK. Cross is primarily a painter, creating works that speak to ancient and mythic lands. Applying thin layers of dry-brush pigment, the paintings are reminiscent of unearthed artefacts. Drawing on a myriad of concepts from mythology and the medieval, Cross' works personify the landscape. Figures, eyes and solitary limbs emerge from clouds and rivers, speaking to an alternate fiction. Ambiguous narratives are formed in reoccurring scenes and motifs, creating an immersive world. His first institutional solo show took place earlier this year at Flatland Projects, Bexhill on Sea, UK, the same year in which he was shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize.
Haroun Hayward (b. 1983, London, UK) received a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Painting from University of Brighton and an MA in Fine Art Practice from Goldsmiths University, London. Hayward’s paintings are a celebration of hybridity, harmoniously converging art historical and musical references with distinct modes of making. The paintings honor what informs Hayward’s personal and artistic narrative - rave culture, abstract expressionism, post war British landscape painting and his mother’s textile collection. Repetition and remixing, to borrow from music terminology, are key to the artist’s painting process. Hayward’s work was recently featured in Unreal City at Saatchi Gallery, London and in TERRA, Burgundy, France.
Virginia Jaramillo (b. 1939, El Paso, Texas) studied at Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, from 1958-61. Jaramillo lives and works in New York. Born in El Paso, Texas, Jaramillo spent her formative years in California before moving to Europe and settling in New York City in late 1960s. Central to a career spanning nearly six decades is Jaramillo’s drive to express materially our sensory perceptions of space and time in what she describes as ‘an aesthetic investigation which seeks to translate into visual terms the mental structural patterns we all superimpose on our world.’ Whether creating bold abstract paintings, sculptural mixed media compositions or meticulously formed handmade paper works, Jaramillo has forged a unique voice, experimenting with material and process to pursue her ongoing explorations of human perception of reality. Jaramillo’s first museum retrospective, Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence is on view at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, Charlotte, NC, which toured the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (MO, USA) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (IL, USA).
Daniel LaRue Johnson (b. 1938, Los Angeles, CA - d. 2017, New York, USA) was a pioneering American artist known for his varied practice encompassing Hard Edge painting, Minimalist sculpture, and public works. Works from the 1970s mark a moment of transformation in Johnson’s practice, moving away from hard-edged geometry and minimalist sculptures towards a purer exploration of colour. In 2011, Johnson’s work was featured prominently in the historic exhibition Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960 – 1980 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. In 2017, Johnson’s work was featured in Tate Modern’s Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (London, UK) which toured to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (AR, USA); Brooklyn Museum (NY, USA); the Broad (CA, USA) and de Young Museum (CA, USA). In 2025, Johnson’s work will be included in Sixties Surreal at The Whitney Museum of American Art.
Rob Lyon (b. 1982 Lancashire, UK) lives and works in Sussex, UK. A self-taught painter, Lyon has developed his own visual lexicon of mark making and motifs, composing landscapes from dots, dashes, triangles, and crosses to more referential repetitions of clouds, birds, and tree shapes. Expanding on Paul Nash’s concept of ‘genius loci’ - the spirit of place - Lyon considers how we as visitors activate the landscape and how the landscape activates us. Walking, looking, and recalling this ‘activation’ are key to the process of making each painting. Pockets of light and airy space evoke an absence, omission, or clearing - Lyon has come to see these spaces as representations of portals that combine as a measure of consecrated land, giving form to the notion that the landscape is a temple of sorts. Lyon has had exhibitions at Warwick Arts Center, UK; Alzueta Gallery, Barcelona Spain; Adams and Ollman, Portland, Oregon, USA: Wondering People, London, UK; Gallery 94, Glyndebourne, UK; Blakefest 2020 and 2017, Bognor Regis, UK; the Warbling Collective, London, UK.
Ebony G. Patterson (b. 1981 Kingston, Jamaica) received a BFA in painting at Edna Manley College, Kingston, Jamaica in 2004 before completing an MFA at Sam Fox College, Washington University in St. Louis, MO in 2006. She lives and works in Kingston, Jamaica and Chicago, IL, USA. Patterson’s expansive practice addresses visibility and invisibility, through explorations of class, race, gender, youth culture, pageantry and acts of violence in the context of “postcolonial” spaces. With the strong sensibility of a painter, Patterson works across multiple media, united by her consistent visual language and intention. Patterson’s major site- specific exhibition, …things come to thrive…in the shedding…in the molting…, was on view at The New York Botanical Garden through September 2023. In 2024, Patterson received the esteemed MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
Kay WalkingStick (b. 1935 Syracuse, NY) is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, she has Cherokee/Anglo heritage. She received a BFA from Beaver College (now Arcadia University) Glenside, PA in 1959 and an MFA from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY in 1975. She lives and works in Pennsylvania. Over a career spanning six decades, WalkingStick’s practice has focused on the American Landscape and its metaphorical significances to Native Americans and people across the world. WalkingStick draws on formal modernist painterly traditions as well as the Native American experience to create works that connect the immediacy of the physical world with the spiritual. In 2024, five major paintings by WalkingStick were included in the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Her solo exhibition, Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School originated at the New York Historical (NY, USA) and toured to the Addison Gallery of American Art (MA, USA).
