Sightlines: Kay WalkingStick, Virginia Jaramillo, Jordan Ann Craig

Hales is pleased to present Sightlines, a group exhibition of works by Kay WalkingStick, Virginia Jaramillo, and Jordan Ann Craig centered on the artists’ rich engagement with the medium of print.

 

Across distinct visual languages spanning WalkingStick’s diptych compositions, Jaramillo’s curvilinear abstractions, and Craig’s geometric patterning, the artists consider the printed surface as a site of orientation and construction, where lines and textures divide, map, and activate pictorial space, moving fluidly between abstraction and representation.

 

Kay WalkingStick’s prints are all composed as diptychs or triptychs, a formal structure she has embraced continuously since the mid-1980s. Pairing depictions of the natural world with gestural and geometric forms, the compositions reflect her longstanding engagement with the land as both physical terrain and cultural presence. Informed by her Cherokee heritage, WalkingStick approaches landscape not as a passive subject, but as a living site of memory, ancestry, and continuity. In works such as Still Blaming the Mountain (2026), her most recent work in the show, she returns to concerns around body, land, and symbolic space, using layered imagery and shifting visual languages to move between the personal and the collective. In Triphammer (1989) and Onrush of Time (1989), WalkingStick explored waterfall imagery alongside abstract forms, using the tumbling water as a recurring motif through which she examined the movement of time and personal memory.

 

Virginia Jaramillo’s Curvilinear Editions build on her trailblazing works of the 1960s and ’70s, extending her longstanding investigation into line, movement, and spatial perception. Influenced deeply by the Japanese concept of Ma—the dynamic relationship between form, space, and interval—works including Gradient Inclination (2021), South Atlantic Anomaly, Maya, and Elysian Fields (all 2022) unfold through sweeping arcs and directional trajectories that traverse the picture plane with precision and restraint. Balancing structure with openness, the compositions create a heightened sense of atmosphere in which line transforms into a spatial and perceptual force.

 

Jordan Ann Craig’s prints build upon her distinctive use of repeated geometric forms arranged within grid and diamond-based structures. Rooted in ongoing research into Northern Cheyenne and Cheyenne bead and quillwork traditions, works such as Diamond Dreams (2019) and Red-Orange Dyed Quills (2019) translate systems of pattern and material knowledge into meticulous visual surfaces. Inspired by Native beadwork, and the grids they use as guides, Craig’s works move through subtle shifts in color, rhythm, and scale. The surfaces suggest movement and continuity, creating compositions that feel simultaneously structured and expansive.

 

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Kay WalkingStick (b. 1935, Syracuse, NY) recently presented Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School, originating at the New-York Historical Society and touring museums across the United States, currently on view at the Allentown Art Museum, PA. Her major retrospective, Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist, toured nationally from 2015–18, originating at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC. In 2024, several of her paintings were included in the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere. Her work is held in numerous museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC, among many others. WalkingStick lives and works in Pennsylvania.

 

Virginia Jaramillo (b. 1939, El Paso, TX) recently presented a major touring retrospective, Principles of Equivalence, at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, Charlotte (2023–25), as well as a solo exhibition, Virginia Jaramillo: The Curvilinear Paintings, 1969-1974, at the Menil Collection, Houston (2020). Her work has also been included in major international exhibitions including Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power and Women in Abstraction. Jaramillo’s work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Baltimore Museum of Art, Perez Art Museum Miami; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others. She lives and works in Hampton Bays, New York.

 

Jordan Ann Craig (b. 1992, San Jose, CA) recently presented solo exhibitions including Do the Patterns Notice Me? at the Philbrook Museum, Tulsa, OK and My Way Home at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM (both 2025). Her solo exhibition it takes a long time to stay here, organized by the Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, is currently touring institutions across the United States through 2027. Her work has also been included in exhibitions at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR and the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, among others. Craig’s work is held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Toledo Museum of Art, OH; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; and Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH, among others. She lives and works in Pojoaque Valley, New Mexico.