Patterns of Knowing featured works by three artists — Jordan Ann Craig, the late Benjamin Harjo Jr. and Jeri Redcorn — exploring how patterns sourced from Indigenous cultures embody a lineage of ideas. Through ceramics, paintings, prints and drawings, they considered the relationship between pattern and information.

Craig (Northern Cheyenne Tribe) paints large-scale canvases with symmetrical, repeated blocks of color in various hues. Her work draws upon the color and rhythm of Indigenous patch- and beadwork to visually articulate time, space and intimate experiences. Craig’s paintings embody the continent’s long-standing relationship with abstract art.

Harjo Jr. (Absentee Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma/Seminole) created colorful prints and paintings often featuring figures in motion against a background frieze of symbols. He experimented with Shawnee and Seminole patterns to generate perspective depth within his compositions. Harjo’s engagement with triangles, squares and stripes celebrates the possibilities of Indigenous pictorial vocabularies.

Redcorn (Caddo Nation of Oklahoma/Citizen Potawatomi) embraces the mathematical and philosophical principles behind Caddoan pottery. Her ceramics feature geometric patterns that weave and intersect to form scrollwork meandering across the surface of vessels. Redcorn’s work evokes the path that heritage Caddo designs have traveled between communities and meditates on their personal and collective significance.

Patterns of Knowing highlighted artworks in which rhythmic, repeated arrangements of shapes, colors and symbols carry knowledge across generations. The exhibition explores how Indigenous artistic principles continue to move and evolve between media, connecting ideas from past to present.