Cannupa Hanska Luger (born 1979) is a New Mexico-based interdisciplinary artist whose community-oriented artworks address environmental justice and gender violence issues.[1]
His parents are Kathy "Elk Woman" Whitman (Fort Berthold Reservation) and Robert "Bruz" Luger.[5] After his parents divorced, he moved with his mother and five siblings to Phoenix, Arizona, where his mother, an artist, sought a marketplace for carved stone sculptures. He spent summers on his father's ranch on the Standing Rock Reservation. The artist credits his mother and his ancestors for providing the confidence to pursue a livelihood as an artist, and to develop a personal creative voice.[2]
Luger's installation, Every One, has been exhibited at the Museum of International Folk Art, the Gardiner Museum[11] and the Denver Art Museum.[12] It is composed of 4,000 individually handmade ceramic beads, collected from Native and other communities throughout the United States and Canada, to represent a collective portrait of missing or murdered indigenous women, girls and LGBTQ victims of gender violence.[13] Luger says of the work, "I didn't do this alone, I did it on the shoulders of giants with a pile of bones under each foot." He emphasizes the collaborative process, "It took hundreds of people to make it."[14]
He has had numerous solo exhibitions including the 2013 show at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Cannupa Hanska Luger Stereotype: Misconceptions of the Native American;[15] a 2016 show, Every line is a song Each shape is a story, at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia; and a 2019 solo show, Every One at the Gardiner Museum, in Toronto Ontario.[16]
Luger is well known for his Mirror Shield Project deployed at the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock in 2016.[17] He designed and fabricated 100 easily made, inexpensive masonite and mirrored-vinyl shields, and posted an instructional video of the fabrication process on social media. A Minneapolis-based group made 500 additional shields with help from Jack Becker of the non-profit organization, Forecast Public Art, and Rory Wakemup from the Minneapolis organization, All My Relations Arts, who facilitated a workshop by the artist.[18][17]
In 2019, his work was presented in a one-person exhibition and performance piece, A Frayed Knot/Afraid Not, and a solo exhibition, Future Ancestral Technologies: nágshibi, dealing with Indigenous science fiction, at the Emerson College Media Art Gallery.[20]
In 2021 Luger presented his debut solo exhibition in New York at Garth Greenan gallery titled New Myth,[23] And presented the installation Something to Hold Onto[24] addressing personal stories in relation to migration and border patrol issues at the southwest U.S. border.[25][26]
Collaborations
While at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Luger was part of the multi-tribal Humble Art Collective in Santa Fe. Later collaborative projects include Mirror Shields, and Every One. Luger has also collaborated with the collective union of artists, Winter Count; the artist collective, Postcommodity; and the Indigenous activist collective R.I.S.E.: Radical Indigenous Survivance and Empowerment.[27]
^Saenger, Peter (April 30, 2021). "The Power of Making Art Together". Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on October 7, 2021. Retrieved October 7, 2021 – via www.wsj.com.
^"Cannupa Hanska Luger". Resistance After Nature. Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford University. 6 March 2017. Archived from the original on 28 December 2018. Retrieved 27 December 2018.
^Miller, Leigh Ann (January 2019). "Awards". Art in America: 96.
^"Cannupa Hanska Luger". Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. 28 June 2016. Archived from the original on 27 December 2018. Retrieved 27 December 2018.
