Back To School: Jordan Ann Craig at Newcomb Art Museum
I often forget to include the handful of university galleries on my local art-viewing itinerary, but as we arrive at the back-to-school moment of the year, I’m making a point of it. I’m glad I did, or I might have missed Jordan Ann Craig’s intimidatingly good show of paintings—it takes a long time to stay here—at Tulane’s Newcomb Art Museum.
Visiting university galleries, we are granted permission to enter a cozy academic microcosm. Pulling up on campus, passing students with backpacks, and entering the quiet of the small museum housed in the Woldenberg Art Center put me in a receptive, teachable mindset like that of a first year undergrad.
The show occupies the largest and airiest of Newcomb’s three galleries. Eight large, abstract acrylic paintings have plenty of breathing room between them and look particularly poised under the high ceiling and skylight. Minimalism, a movement that followed Abstract Expressionism, set about removing gestural painterly mess considered… expressive. From the entrance, I see that the work has all the earmarks of Minimalism: large-scale, flat geometric shapes, grids, and symmetry. All eight paintings are square, the least natural and most conceptual of shapes.
Yet before even approaching the paintings, the show’s title, prominently displayed on the largest wall, suggests tension between the original Minimalist credo and this work. The title, it takes a long time to stay here, pulls the work into something more lyrical (and contemporary) than “pure form.” Two walls have been painted the color of butternut squash, a precise color that also abandons the reductive Minimalism of the “white cube.” The other two walls are an equally deliberate very light gray.
Each piece in the show deploys a limited visual vocabulary—small rectangular bands of flat color and, lesser in number, large acute triangles arranged in a geometric framework. And yet, each canvas has a distinct character the way a trio of instruments can produce music in both major and minor keys. Abstract (non-representational) art is frequently compared to music, specifically music without lyrics. These paintings lean hard into pure abstraction so one might expect unapproachable titles that underscore the painting’s formal elements (for example, Grid with Grey). But Craig’s titles (like Baby You’re So Blue) are surprisingly approachable, in current vernacular, more radio song than classical piano.
True to the tenets of Minimalism, these are not pictures of something, but containers for something. While the works themselves may not flagrantly express emotion, I had an intense emotional response in front of Be Beautiful, Be Invisible. It was a kind of insecurity brought on by how put-together looking the painting is. Like meeting an impeccably dressed, flawlessly mannered person at a party, looking at the painting, I felt comparatively like a mess of a human. The pristine bars of color are slightly raised—clearly human-made—but there were no fingerprints, no tiny hairs stuck to the surface. I like paint and the mess it makes, but my own physical and mental awkwardness in the face of these paintings fascinated me.
Whenever I can, I look at the sides of the canvas for traces of process. Excusing myself from the perfect surface of these paintings felt necessary. The passages of raw canvas with occasional paint stains made my eyes unclench. The geometric surface gives way to a rough edge, and we see how the layers were laid down. Moving from the confrontation of the surface to the relief of the edges feels like the intended path through the work.
In half of the paintings there is a motif, a reoccurring visual hook. Before encountering any text about the artist or the work, I saw these motifs and presumed they reference Indigenous Americans. I struggled to pinpoint how but it was confirmed by the wall text: “Jordan Ann Craig (born 1992) is a Northern Cheyenne artist…” How can mere shape and color conjure a people, a culture, and complex history? “Mere shape” I say, but the fact is shape and color are foundational to visual language. Over the years I must have been exposed to similar motifs in and outside school, where I grew up on the unceded territory of the Onondaga Nation in Central New York.
Well before Minimalists deployed rectangles, triangles, and grids to communicate Western art ideas to Western art viewers, Indigenous people used these elements to record information, stories, and to differentiate tribes. Native Americans had been using grid patterns on pottery, in basketweaving, and looms for centuries before Europeans set foot on North America. The Cheyenne and other northern tribes practiced quillwork, a decorative technique using porcupine quills that result in grids with elongated cells. Reading about this, I suddenly understand the lineage of the long bars of color in Craig’s paintings and the title of one painting, Dyed Quills no. 2; Don’t Quill the Vibe, deepens in meaning.
Factual knowledge can be taught (or read on the Wikipedia page about Cheyenne quillwork). Other forms of knowledge are acquired through the senses. Art has the capacity to offer empirical knowledge gained by hours of looking. It’s an accessible, ongoing form and focal point for self-education. Looking at art can also advance self-knowledge if we cultivate a hyper-awareness of our own reactions to it (like my insecurity in front of Craig’s meticulous paintings). Art gives us something to be curious about, and curiosity is a feeling and posture befitting the time of year.
it takes a long time to stay here: Paintings by Jordan Ann Craig is on display through January 16, 2026, with a reception on September 19. For more info, check out newcombartmuseum.tulane.edu.
Photo by Emily Farranto: Jordan Ann Craig, Sharp Tongue: Working on Empathy, 2024. Acrylic on canvas.
