Cannupa Hanska Luger is an interdisciplinary artist whose community-oriented artworks address environmental justice and gender violence issues.
Early life
Cannupa Hanska Luger was born and raised in Fort Yates, North Dakota, on the Standing Rock Reservation, and currently lives in New Mexico. He is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikawa, and also has Lakota, Austrian, and Norwegian heritage. His parents are Kathy "Elk Woman" Whitman and Robert "Bruz" Luger. 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.
Luger's large-scale installations, social sculptures and performances use video, sound, and a range of sculptural materials to engage in "political activism in order to communicate stories about twenty-first-century indigeneity." His work has been exhibited at the Princeton University Art Museum, Museum of Northern Arizona, the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Center for Visual Arts, Denver, and the Galerie Orenda in Paris, France, as well as the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City that honored him with the inaugural Burke Prize. Luger has also exhibited at the Gardiner Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Washington Project for the Arts, and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, and at Art Mûr in Montreal. He has had numerous solo exhibitions including his 2013 show at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Cannupa Hanska Luger Stereotype: Misconceptions of the Native American, 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. Lugar is well known for his Mirror Shield Project deployed at the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock in 2016. 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. Luger's installation, Every One, shown at the Museum of International Folk Art, 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. 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." He organized the Lazy Stitch exhibition at the Ent Center for Contemporary Art, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, Galleries of Contemporary Art in 2018. In 2019, his work was presented in a one-person exhibition and performance piece, A Frayed Knot/Afraid Not, and an interactive program, Something to Hold Onto, addressing personal stories in relation to migration and border patrol issues at the southwest U.S. border. He also had a solo exhibition, Future Ancestral Technologies: nágshibi, dealing with Indigenous science fiction, at the Emerson College Media Art Gallery. In 2020, his work is presented in the Larger than Memory: Contemporary Art from Indigenous North America, exhibition at the Heard Museum.
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, ; the artist collective, ; and the Indigenous activist collective R.I.S.E.: Radical Indigenous Survivance and Empowerment.
