Library Street Collective presents ‘A Heart and a Land’ exhibition

Library Street Collective in Detroit presents “A Heart and a Land,” a two-artist exhibition with work by Jordan Ann Craig and Joanna Keane Lopez, curated by Allison Glenn.

The exhibition examines formal, material, and conceptual connections between the two artists, whose practices are shaped by shared ties to New Mexico and the San Francisco Bay Area.

The exhibition opens with a public reception on January 24 and runs through March 18.

Developed through an invitation to engage with Detroit’s histories, “A Heart and a Land” draws on research into museum collections, regional infrastructure, and layered geographies. Craig’s contributions include paintings developed in response to Cheyenne and Northern Cheyenne objects held in the Detroit Institute of the Arts’ (DIA) collection. Lopez presents a new body of hand-cast adobe works that trace the Nike missile program as a historical and geographic link between Detroit and southern New Mexico—two places connected to her family history.

Craig, a Northern Cheyenne artist, is known for large-scale geometric paintings that engage Indigenous abstraction across time and place. For this exhibition, she studied a range of historical Cheyenne and Northern Cheyenne objects at the DIA, including moccasins, a beaded knife case, weathered buckskin, and a tobacco bag. Her 2025 painting “Still, Still” references the intricate beadwork of a rawhide, deerskin, and glass bead knife case from around 1875. By isolating and reinterpreting sections of these designs, Craig’s work raises questions about ownership, value, and continuity within Indigenous artistic traditions.

Lopez’s work is rooted in her familial connections to Detroit and southern New Mexico. Her new adobe sculptures focus on the Nike missile program, a Cold War air-defense system that included sixteen deployment sites around Detroit and testing operations at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The surfaces of the maple-framed adobe works incorporate archival images of Detroit-area missile sites alongside graphite rubbings taken from structures on Lopez’s family ranch at White Sands. One work, “Energetic Materials” (2025), references both the technical language used to describe explosives and Lopez’s understanding of adobe as a material embedded with care, labor, and history. The work points to the dual use of landscapes for both domestic life and military testing.

The exhibition also includes an earthen vessel by Brandon Adriano Ortiz-Concha and a photograph by Maryssa Chávez, taken during an adobe-building workshop led by Lopez.

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