Library Street Collective is pleased to announce a two person exhibition of work by Jordan Ann Craig and Joanna Keane Lopez, curated by Allison Glenn. A Heart and a Land considers the formal and conceptual connections between Jordan Ann Craig’s (Northern Cheyenne) and Joanna Keane Lopez’s practices and shared communities, which are both rooted in New Mexico and the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Emerging from an invitation to deeply connect to Detroit’s histories, including museum collections, infrastructure, environments, and more, A Heart and a Land includes paintings Craig developed while researching Cheyenne and Northern Cheyenne objects in the Detroit Institute of the Arts’ (DIA) collection and new adobe works by Lopez that center on the Nike missile program as the historical link between Detroit and southern New Mexico, two places the artist has familial connections.

Jordan Ann Craig is a Northern Cheyenne artist who develops large-scale, visually-stunning, hard-edged, geometric paintings that explore the histories of color, shape, repetition, and form within Indigenous abstraction across space and time. To develop this new body of work, Craig spent time researching Cheyenne and Northern Cheyenne objects in the Detroit Institute of the Arts’ (DIA) collection, and developed paintings in response to a series of objects including moccasins, a beaded knife case, weathering buckskin and a tobacco bag. The design of Still, Still (2025) directly references a section of intricate beadwork on the surface of a rawhide, deerskin, and glass bead knifecase from c.1875. Selecting a portion of this design to dialogue with, Craig’s paintings question notions of ownership and value while connecting to traditions deeply embedded in her practice.

Familial connections to Detroit inspired the work of Joanna Keane Lopez. This new body of work centers on the Nike missile program as the historical link between Detroit and southern New Mexico. In the 1950s, Nike missiles were produced and deployed at sixteen sites around Detroit as part of the Cold-War air-defense network and tested at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Nike Missile sites in Detroit include Belle Isle, Detroit Metropolitan Airport, and Rouge Park. The surfaces of these maple-framed, hand-cast adobe works include archival images of mid-twentieth century Nike sites in Detroit alongside graphite rubbings of the horse corrals and stone well of Lopez’s family ranch located on White Sands Missile Range. The title Energetic Materials (2025), a vertical work with images of an explosion at White Sands is a reference to substances that have significant chemical energy. While ‘energetic materials’ is a term often used to describe explosives and other propellants, Lopez also identifies adobe as an energetically charged material that is the embodiment of care and the histories of adobe building, noting that the same landscapes that can be used to build homes have also been used for ballistics testing.

The invitation to Craig and Lopez comes out of an interest in considering the formal and conceptual connections between their practices and shared communities, which are rooted in New Mexico and the San Francisco Bay Area. Lopez, who grew up in Albuquerque, spends her time working between Galisteo and San Francisco. Craig, who is Northern Cheyenne, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and lives in Pojoaque Valley, New Mexico. Within the desert landscape, interdependence is necessary for survival. The curatorial invitation to include an earthen vessel created by Brandon Adriano Ortiz-Concha and a photograph by Maryssa Chávez–taken from an adobe-building workshop led by Lopez–is a reference to how interdependence manifests in Craig and Lopez’s creative circles in New Mexico and beyond.