The Art Institute of Chicago acquires work by Jordan Ann Craig

Hales is delighted to announce that the Art Institute of Chicago has acquired Jordan Ann Craig, to you my happy girl, 2025.

 

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 deeply informed by Northern Cheyenne and Cheyenne visual culture. Craig has developed her own visual lexicon of colour and form, including interwoven and at times infinite patterns and grids that are rooted in her research of indigenous objects. Craig’s work 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 practice is grounded in research, which begins in museum collections and archives. Her pictorial vocabulary builds upon the initial inspiration of Northern Cheyenne and Cheyenne beadwork, quillwork, drawings and textiles, which can be seen in specific recurring patterning. In the large-scale brightly coloured to you my happy girl, 2025, Craig enlarges the motifs, emphasizing the gridded framework used to map out beadwork patterns. The layered ridges produced in these painterly grids create a textural surface akin to the layering of textiles found in Cheyenne quilt making, as if weaving with paint. The two panels of the diptych are hung with a narrow space between them to echo the two sections found in Native breastplate designs.