Hales is delighted to announce The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket, New Mexico-based artist Jordan Ann Craig's (Northern Cheyenne) second solo exhibition with the gallery.
Craig is known for vibrant and often densely composed paintings which are characterized by a dynamic exploration and interpretation of Northern Cheyenne and Cheyenne material culture. Craig's solo exhibition, My Way Home, is currently on view at IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts and she was recently the subject of a solo exhibition, it takes a long time to stay here, at the Block Museum, Northwestern University, IL (2025). Her work is currently 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).
The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket is a line from Creation Story Blues, a poem by Diné poet, Kinsale Drake and the title of her debut collection of poetry, which Heid E. Erdrich writes, "... come at you with a million volts of every kind of verbal and poetic intelligence." The collection of poetry, 'traverses the Southwest landscape, exploring intricate relationships between Native peoples and the natural world, land, pop culture, twentieth-century music, and multi-generational representations.' Resonating with Drake's writing, Craig's work interweaves personal Native identity with an exploration of collective heritage, and is greatly influenced by the Southwest landscape which surrounds her studio.
In a new body of large-scale paintings, Craig deepens her exploration of color, pattern and bold geometric schemes. In expansive compositions of repeated forms, she considers spatial relationships - experimenting with different orientations in her ongoing series of 'Sharp Tongue' works, quill paintings, and diptychs. Each intricate painting has an underlying grid which unifies her exploration of the languages of modern abstract painting and its 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 large-scale, brightly colored diptychs-to you my happy girl and is this pink enough for you (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 diptychs are hung with a narrow space between them to echo the two sections found in Native breastplate designs.
Dancing Still and Decent with Melancholy (2025) are part of a new series of horizontal striped paintings, informed by Cheyenne banded willow objects, which are used to provide comfort and back support within a tepee. Craig's muted, nuanced color combinations emphasize the natural material of willow and how it absorbs pigment, as well as her affinity to the changing of seasons and their effect on the landscape surrounding her studio in New Mexico. The powerful simplicity of these works is reiterated in maybe a little more than a little (2025), where lighter lines in the painting reference animal hide and its darker repeated lines have a vibrational quality. Through the process of painting Craig meditates on the personal and collective significance of Indigenous designs.