Jordan Craig

Northern Cheyenne painter and printmaker Jordan Ann Craig comes to IARC as an emerging artist. She graduated from Dartmouth College in 2015 with a B.A in Studio Art and Psychology. While at Dartmouth she was a Curatorial Fellow at the Black Family Visual Arts Center and a Studio Art Special Instructor.

Craig’s paintings, prints and artist books are meticulous, and sometimes obsessive in mark or repetition. She draws her inspiration from Aboriginal art, Indigenous textiles and pottery, and landscapes. She tells stories about her childhood, family, trauma, and the appealing mundane.

Craig comments:

Using dots, peculiar geometries, cut paper, and pattern, I explore the feeling of forgetting how to sleep, the memory of building homes in trees, and the translation of language and dreams. I seek to balance the familiar and the mysterious, shared stories and secrets.

While in residence at SAR, Craig will utilize the IARC collection to find inspiration, focusing on textiles, basket weavings and pottery to make preliminary sketches. From these drawings she will design her own patterns, creating stories and symbolism within the patterns. Craig plans to translate these patterns into large scale oil paintings as well as binding artist books utilizing her sketches and digital images of the patterns. She writes, “During the fellowship, I would like to push the boundaries of what defines Native American art.”

Craig will be in residence at SAR from March 1 – May 31, 2018.