"I am fully a maximalist," Jordan Ann Craig says with a laugh. "If you saw my house there are, like, 40 plants and so many different colors and rugs on rugs."
This admission might surprise viewers of Craig’s geometric paintings while simultaneously dispelling any notion that her precisely calculated works reflect a minimalist sensibility. But it does capture a certain tension between restraint and abundance that permeates her artistic practice.
The Northern Cheyenne artist is currently based in the Pojoaque Valley, and she has carved out a distinctive approach to abstract painting that draws from Indigenous design traditions while engaging with modernist techniques. Craig’s practice is characterized by rigorous attention to detail, as evident in her studious process of researching and translating digitizations into striking and sizable paintings.
“Research kind of sounds probably more formal than what my process really might look like,” she further admits.
Craig’s current exhibition at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art, My Way Home, spans work from 2018 to 2022 and marks several significant periods in Craig's artistic development, including paintings created during residencies at both the School for Advanced Research (SAR) and the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). The show also brings together two distinct approaches to abstraction: hard-edged geometric paintings and meticulously crafted dot compositions that suggest ethereal vistas.
“I had planned to make paintings based off of Pueblo pottery, weaving, basketry,” Craig says of her 2018 fellowship at SAR, “and transcribe the digitizations into large-scale paintings.”
But the magnitude of the pottery collection demanded her full attention.
"As soon as I stepped into that research center, into the vault,” she adds, “I decided to eliminate anything and everything but the Pueblo pottery just because there was so much there. It was an incredible and life-changing experience—I had access to the largest collection of Pueblo pottery on the planet."
Craig’s more recent work, however, draws from a different chromatic tradition. By 2019, during her IAIA residency, Craig's focus had shifted to Northern Cheyenne beadwork.
"That was my second time in New Mexico and first time painting from and abstracting plains Indian beadwork," she notes.
It was a pivotal moment in her artistic development.
"Now I'm using what was originally traded from Venice, Italy,” she explains. “Glass beads where there was an unlimited color influence."
This liberation from earth tones led to new experiments.
“I've been known to make a hot pink painting or a cadmium light painting, or really bold, color-intense paintings,” she says.
Craig’s current MoCNA exhibition returns to more subdued New Mexico situated palettes.
"Everything in my home and my property is covered in dirt and dust," she observes. "Light brown and tan is the color I see the most."
Parallel to her geometric works, Craig creates mesmerizing dot paintings using an unusual technique she began using in 2015.
"I have an acrylic base and I use oil paint and Q-tips to stamp each dot that covers the canvas from the left top corner to the right bottom corner," she says.
As each Q-tip stamp gradually loses pigment, it creates subtle gradients that repeat row by row.
She terms these "memory landscapes"—abstract configurations that suggest familiar forms without depicting specific locations.
“They’re very abstract,” she says, “and they’re very meditative for me.”.
These labor-intensive works can come with a physical toll, however.
"I lost feeling in my hand for about a month last time I did one," Craig says.
Even so, she says, she hopes to return to this meditative practice when time permits.
Craig's work is often compared to modernist pioneers like Bridget Riley and Agnes Martin, although you can catch hints of Hércules Barsotti, Vera Molnár and François Morellet as well. Craig openly admires Riley and Martin and is keenly aware of their influence on her work, noting Martin's influence in particular due to her "obsession with grids and repetitive mark making.”
I truly am a big Agnes Martin fan,” Craif points out. “I respect her practice and how she lived and how she worked."
Yet her influences extend beyond fine art.
"I'm interested in the decor of things,” she tells SFR. “Like old Mexican tiles and finishes to restaurant interiors.”
Craig sees no contradiction between decorative and fine art traditions. In fact, she says, "I want to mesh and blend these two worlds—I think that you can have a craft that is fine art and vice-versa.”
Craig's schedule suggests an artist in high demand. Beyond My Way Home at MoCNA, she's opening another solo exhibition at Northwestern University's Block Museum of Art in Illinois, preparing for a New York exhibition at Hales Gallery and heading to Miami for a summer residency. Her speaking engagements span institutions from Parsons School of Design to Oklahoma State University, yet despite her prolific output and growing recognition, Craig preserves a thoughtful approach to her practice.
"My work is laborious and precise," she concludes. "The attention to how I make things is very cautious and thought out. I'm a very prolific worker, I don't sit around."
