Jordan Ann Craig's 'My Way Home' at MoCNA, a new approach to Indigenous abstraction

Jordan Ann Craig's 'My Way Home' at MoCNA, a new approach to Indigenous abstraction

Mar 9, 2025

SANTA FE — New Mexico-based Northern Cheyenne artist Jordan Ann Craig had her first solo show in 2015, the year she graduated from Dartmouth College, and “My Way Home” at the Institute of American Indian Arts’ Museum of Contemporary Native Arts gives a selectively curated overview of her first 10 years in the art world. Craig’s quest for self-discovery takes her from the deep archives of Indigenous art to the forefront of contemporary digital design, as she attempts to blaze her own “way home” through layers of historical erasure.

Although a more comprehensive early-career retrospective would showcase Craig’s increasingly inventive experiments with color, the muted palette of “My Way Home” allows viewers to connect three distinct bodies of work — her hard-edged geometric paintings, her research-oriented pattern books and her post-minimalist dot paintings. Across these media, Craig maintains a consistent point of view, balancing emotional warmth with coolness, tradition with contemporaneity, analytical rigor with subtle, quirky humor. And the fact that the colors in these pieces also evoke clay pottery, blankets and buckskin will help viewers draw parallels to traditions of Indigenous abstraction that predate Western forms.

Craig’s playful sensibility is apparent in the painting “Ladybugs Are Birds” (2018), which samples and remixes motifs from the legendary Acoma Pueblo ceramic artist Lucy M. Lewis (1890-1992). Craig recombines Lewis’ animal motifs into a polka-dotted geometric figure that looks like an origami ladybug, which she rotates and repeats in the style of a fabric or wallpaper pattern. The work pays homage to Lewis — and perhaps also early modernist pattern-makers Lyubov Popova and Anni Albers — but Craig takes herself less seriously than those artists. Her references are well researched and smart, but the painting itself is fun and cute.

“On My Way Home,” the painting from which the exhibition gets its title, features a step-pyramid motif, which signifies a butte or hill in late-19th century Cheyenne bead work. Interpreted literally, the painting represents the landscape of the Pojoaque Valley, just outside of Santa Fe, where Craig lives and works. But “My Way Home” also alludes to the artist’s ongoing process of cultural homecoming. Having grown up in California with a mother who’d been adopted out of the tribe, “home” is not necessarily the place Craig was born, nor where she lives now, but a speculative and elusive place that’s always just beyond the horizon.

Craig, who plans her hard-edged compositions digitally, has stacked and replicated the Cheyenne butte motif in a way that recalls the rows of triangular space squids in the iconic 1978 arcade game Space Invaders, and I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to read a Space Invaders subtext into the work. After all, fictional alien invasions have often been used as metaphors for European colonization, from H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel “War of the Worlds” to Dan Trachtenberg’s 2022 film “Prey.” The ancestral “home” that Craig is journeying toward, and that her Cheyenne visual language represents, is one that has been changed irreparably by centuries of colonial violence and by the multifarious effects of digital technologies.

In his 1986 essay, “The Deployment of the Geometric,” the neo-geo painter Peter Halley wrote, “We are today enraptured by the very geometries that once represented coercive discipline. Today, children sit for hours fascinated by the Day-Glo geometric displays of video games.”

Just as Halley’s paintings exposed surprising connections between abstract art, arcade games and prison designs, Craig’s conceptual compositions make equally astute and provocative connections between visual forms and their interwoven histories.

Craig is not the first Indigenous artist whose work code-switches between Western and Indigenous languages of abstraction. Leon Polk Smith (1906-1996), a leading figure in the 1950s hard-edged painting movement, was thought to have Cherokee roots. Although Smith’s Indigenous influences went largely unrecognized in his lifetime, it was the subject of the Heard Museum’s 2021 exhibition “Hiding in Plain Sight,” which led to a widespread reappraisal of the artist’s career.

Redstar Price is a Crow artist who attended the IAIA in Santa Fe in the 1960s and whose grandmother’s parfleche bags informed her abstract paintings. Jeffrey Gibson, who became the first Native American artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2024, is another important Indigenous artist working in abstraction. Santa Fe-based artist Terran Last Gun is another. Last Gun and Craig were both presented Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation awards in 2024.

Craig’s research-based practice bears similarities to Dyani White Hawk’s, as well. An abstract artist of Sicangu Lakota ancestry, White Hawk was exhibited alongside Craig in the 2022 exhibition “Self-Determined” at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe.

Clearly, Indigenous artists have played a significant role in the development of abstract painting, and Craig is an important figure in the current renaissance of Indigenous abstraction.

With her personal, idiosyncratic approach, Craig brings warmth and humor to seemingly cold geometric forms, while simultaneously infusing those forms with the memories of their multi-layered histories. Respectful of past traditions but unafraid to shuffle and remix them, Craig finds her own way home.