Meet the Artists: Session 5
Isabella Mellado, Jordan Craig, and Kayla Mattes
Isabella, Jordan and Kayla will be in residence at Fountainhead from June 25 to July 23, 2025. Their residency programs are sponsored by the Carlo and Micol Schejola Foundation. Isabella’s residency is in partnership with YoungArts.
Isabella Mellado
Isabella Mellado (b. San Juan, Puerto Rico) is a painter and photographer based in Chicago, IL. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2018 and her Masters in Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023. Mellado is best known for her magical realist paintings on latinidad, queer identity, tarot and occult spirituality. She works in a wide range of media including painting, photography, costume design, digital collage and sculpture.
Mellado’s journey through Catholic shame to spiritual awakening is the context behind Siete Pecados. This series of seven paintings embodies and subverts how the global west has defined each “sin”—pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust—since they were first mentioned in Genesis. Each painting defies the guilt and shame that the Catholic Church teaches its followers, empowering its subjects rather than condemning them for their sins. In this series, Catholic characters and symbolism exist in tension with references to the tarot, witchcraft and Mellado’s lived experience as a queer Puerto Rican woman.
Jordan Craig
Jordan Craig is a Northern Cheyenne artist whose geometric abstractions honor Indigenous material culture while pushing the boundaries of contemporary painting. Her meticulous hard-edge compositions draw from the visual languages of Cheyenne and Northern Cheyenne beadwork and quillwork, reimagined through a distinctly modern lens. With bold color combinations, structured grids, and flat, digitized surfaces, her paintings pay homage to the Native artists who came before her while commenting on cultural survival, translation, and removal. In Craig’s hands, abstraction becomes a form of storytelling—where pattern, repetition, and form convey both collective memory and personal narrative.
Deeply influenced by her heritage, family, and formative experiences, Craig’s practice is shaped by resilience, humor, and a strong sense of identity. Her work weaves together stories of childhood anxieties, familial bonds, love, heartbreak, and healing, often blurring the lines between the mundane and the poetic. While the visual elements are precise and meditative, they hold within them intimate tales and unspoken rhythms—a kind of coded language where dots and shapes serve as words. Craig’s paintings invite viewers into a space where beauty conceals history, and where the deeply personal merges with the broadly cultural.
Kayla Mattes
Kayla Mattes archives the ephemerality of digital culture through the interconnected threads of weaving. Her handwoven tapestries embrace the narrative and technological history embedded in the act of materializing thread into the woven grid. Driven by meme-culture, current events, and the chaos of our digital lives, her work weaves together narratives that simultaneously act as jokes and social commentary.
Mattes received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2011 and her MFA from University of California Santa Barbara in 2019. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally including Charlie James Gallery, (Los Angeles), Eli & Edythe Broad Museum (Michigan), Asia Art Center (Taipei and Beijing), Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (Portland, OR), Torrance Art Museum (California), Richard Heller Gallery (Los Angeles), and Collaborations (Copenhagen). Her work has been featured in Artnet, New American Paintings, and she is one of twenty weavers included in the 2018 book, Weaving: Contemporary Makers on the Loom. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Crocker Art Museum (Sacramento, CA) and the Eli & Edythe Broad Museum (Michigan). She lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
