Frieze Los Angeles | Booth B17: Jordan Ann Craig

For the 2026 edition of Frieze Los Angeles, Hales is proud to exhibit a solo presentation of new paintings by Jordan Ann Craig, marking her first one-person project in California, where she was born and raised. Craig’s solo exhibition it takes a long time to stay here is currently touring the US, its latest iteration at Westmoreland Museum of American Art (2026-2027), and Jordan Ann Craig: Do the Patterns Notice Me? is on view at the Philbrook Museum of Art (2025-2026).  

 

Craig is known for bold, exacting compositions that embrace her distinctive visual language rooted in Northern Cheyenne and Cheyenne material culture. Through painting and printmaking, she explores her Northern Cheyenne ancestry, whilst posing questions about modern abstract painting and its relationship to Indigenous culture. Drawing on archival research, it’s through an innovative use of color, line, and geometric form that Craig draws attention to this connection between time and culture. The works presented in Los Angeles represent key strands of Craig’s practice, deepening her ongoing exploration and experimentation in the Sharp Tongue series, quill paintings, grid formations, and diptychs. 

 

There is a fluidity to Craig’s practice, a push and pull between varying points of description and distillation. The Sharp Tongue series has developed over the years, whereby Craig has refined a simplified, repeated triangular form in various permutations—an experiment in how far a painting can pursue minimalism whilst holding on to the essence of Native image making.  Within the parameters of the series, Craig continues to experiment with different orientations, scales, densities, vibrant interplays of color and spatiality. Similarly, in Five Seven (2025), Craig embraces a meticulous blue grid, disrupting it with horizontal pink blocks influenced by intricate beadwork patterning and border detailing from a Cheyenne Tobacco Bag, once again considering what forms and colors, and how they’re composed, hold the spirit of Indigenous visual culture.  

 

The surface of the work is of great importance, the layered ridges produced in the painterly grids create a textural surface akin to the layering of textiles found in Cheyenne quilt making, as if weaving with paint. There is a powerful simplicity to Dyed Quills Orange Red no. 3; The Floor is Lava (2025) where vertical lines in numerous hues of red and gold interference paint vibrate against each other as they reflect light. For Craig, this visual sensation is suggestive of how porcupine quills, used by Native people, absorb dye differently and the inherent shine they produce. The vivid pink diptych Are We Gonna Kiss (2025) holds a tension, its patterning being more descriptive of those found on Plains beaded pipe bags, Craig enlarging the motif to emphasize a gridded framework of the formation. These diptychs, the two panels hung with a narrow space between them, allude to the two sections of a Native breastplate. In continuing experiments with medium, in Sharp Tongue; More Delicate Than Usual (2025) Craig incorporates micaceous iron oxide to create a shimmering, effervescent quality, again adding a physicality and movement to her surfaces.  

 

Craig’s practice is defined by a sustained commitment to experimentation, attentive to how ideas migrate through time, form, and material. Motifs refined in one body of work are tested, pushed, or distilled in another, allowing each series to inform the next while retaining its own internal logic. The paintings reveal a practice that is both rigorous and open-ended, grounded in ancestral knowledge yet insistently forward-looking.  

 

Craig (b. 1992 San Jose, CA, USA) received her BA in Studio Art and Psychology from Dartmouth College in 2015. She lives and works in Santa Fe County, New Mexico.      

 

Craig's solo exhibition, it takes a long time to stay here, originated at the Block Museum, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL (2025) and is currently the traveling the United States, supported by Art Bridges. The tour includes Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA (2025); Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Pittsburgh, PA (2026-27); Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, (2027). In 2025 her solo exhibition Jordan Ann Craig: Do the Patterns Notice Me? opened at Philbrook Museum, Tulsa, OK, USA (through 10 October 2026) and her solo exhibition, My Way Home, opened at IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM. Her work was included in Indigenous Identities: Here, Now and Always at the Zimmerli Art Museum and was featured in American Sunrise: Indigenous Art at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2024-2025). Craig has had solo exhibitions at the Roswell Museum and Art Center, NM; School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, NM; The Guesthouse, Cork, Ireland; Scuola Internazionale di Grafica Venezia, Italy; Nearburg Gallery, Black Family Visual Arts Center, Hanover, NH; and Barrows Rotunda, Dartmouth College, NH.  

 

Selected collections include Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Toledo Museum of Art, OH; Block Museum of Art, IL; Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH; Wichita Art Museum, KS; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, Roswell, NM; IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA; School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, NM; A LAB, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Cork Printmakers, Ireland; Tia Collection, Santa Fe, NM and Forge Collection, Taghkanic, NY.