Jordan Ann Craig

Can't Cry Anymore You Laugh

Jordan Ann Craig is a Northern Cheyenne painter known for her intricate melding of community-derived pattern designs and high-modernist abstraction. While works like Can’t Cry Anymore You Laugh are informed by the geometric patterns that are characteristic of Cheyenne beadwork and parfleche, the overall symmetry of the composition and the color palette’s restraint recall the process-based abstractions of post-war American modernists, such as Ad Reinhardt and Agnes Martin. Through this deliberate conflation, Craig highlights the arbitrary nature of traditional/contemporary and Native/Western binaries.