Cannupa Hanska Luger

Summary

Cannupa Hanska Luger (born 1979) is a New Mexico-based interdisciplinary artist whose community-oriented artworks address environmental justice and gender violence issues.[1]

Cannupa Hanksa Luger
Born1979 (1979)
NationalityThree Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation
EducationInstitute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, NM
Known forInstallation art, Sculpture, Performance art, Environmental art, Ecological art
AwardsBurke Prize (2018), National Artist Fellowship (2016), Multicultural Fellowship Award (2015)
Websitehttp://www.cannupahanska.com

Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation and is of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, Austrian, and Norwegian heritage.[2][3]

Early life edit

Cannupa Hanska Luger was born and raised in Fort Yates, North Dakota, on the Standing Rock Reservation.[4]

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]

Education edit

In 2011, Luger received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in studio arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts.[5]

Exhibitions and public artwork edit

 
Every One, 2018, by Cannupa Hanska Luger

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."[6][7][8] 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.[3][9] 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.[10]

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]

He organized the Lazy Stitch exhibition at the Ent Center for Contemporary Art, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, Galleries of Contemporary Art in 2018.[19]

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 2020, his work was presented in the Larger than Memory: Contemporary Art from Indigenous North America, exhibition at the Heard Museum.[10] Also in 2020, Luger co-directed and designed costumes for Sweet Land, a site-specific, multi-perspectival opera about colonialism, that was presented at the Los Angeles State Historical Park[21] and which was awarded best new opera by the Music Critics Association of North America for 2020.[22]

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 edit

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]

Awards and honors edit

In 2015 Luger received a Multicultural Fellowship Award from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts.[28] In 2018, the artist was awarded with the first Burke Prize for American studio crafts from the Museum of Arts and Design in New York.[7][14][29] In 2016 he received a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation.[30] In 2019 Luger was awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, was a 2019 Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Honoree, and in 2020, he received a Creative Capital Award,[10] an artist fellowship from the Craft Research Fund,[31] and A Blade of Grass Foundation fellowship for socially engaged art.[32] In 2020 he was awarded an Artist Research Fellowship at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. In 2022 he was awarded the Guggenheim fellowship in Fine Arts.[33]

Public collections edit

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ Cohen, Gabe (6 November 2018). "Cannupa Hanska Luger Wins New $50,000 Arts Prize". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 27 December 2018. Retrieved 27 December 2018.
  2. ^ a b "Creative Disruption Cannupa Hanska Luger builds sculptures and installations that shatter misconceptions". American Craft Council. Archived from the original on 27 December 2018. Retrieved 27 December 2018.
  3. ^ a b Rinaldi, Ray Mark (10 August 2017). "In two Denver exhibits, artist Cannupa Hanska Luger connects viewers to the ground beneath their feet". The Denver Post. Archived from the original on 27 December 2018. Retrieved 27 December 2018.
  4. ^ Irwin, Matthew (4 September 2012). "Native Talent". Santa Fe Reporter. Archived from the original on 28 December 2018. Retrieved 27 December 2018.
  5. ^ a b c d e f "Cannupa Hanska Luger". Bennington College. Archived from the original on 28 December 2018. Retrieved 27 December 2018.
  6. ^ Grimason, Maggie (28 August 2019). "All Work and All Play: At Home with Artists Cannupa Hanska Luger and Ginger Dunnill". Southwest Contemporary. Archived from the original on 4 November 2019. Retrieved 4 November 2019.
  7. ^ a b Selvin, Claire (6 November 2018). "Cannupa Hanska Luger Wins Museum of Arts and Design's Inaugural Burke Prize". Art News. Archived from the original on 28 December 2018. Retrieved 27 December 2018.
  8. ^ "MAD Announces Cannupa Hanska Luger as Winner of the Inaugural Burke Prize". Museum of Arts and Design. Archived from the original on 27 December 2018. Retrieved 27 December 2018.
  9. ^ "What American Art Reveals About Our Changing Environment and National Identity". Peabody Essex Museum. Archived from the original on 28 December 2018. Retrieved 27 December 2018.
  10. ^ a b c "Larger Than Memory: Contemporary Art From Indigenous North America". Heard Museum. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
  11. ^ Hanc, John (October 23, 2019). "Illuminating the Plight of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women". The New York Times. Archived from the original on August 8, 2020. Retrieved August 2, 2020.
  12. ^ 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.
  13. ^ Abatemarco, Michael (7 November 2018). "Santa Fe artist wins inaugural $50,000 Burke Prize". Santa Fe New Mexican. Archived from the original on 8 November 2018. Retrieved 27 December 2018.
  14. ^ a b Fedderly, Eva (8 November 2018). "Cannupa Hanska Luger Marries Craft and Modern Identity for Powerful, Multilayered Works". Architectural Digest. Archived from the original on 28 December 2018. Retrieved 27 December 2018.
  15. ^ "Cannupa Hanska Luger Stereotype: Misconceptions of the Native American". Museum of Contemporary Native American Art. Archived from the original on 22 October 2020. Retrieved 27 December 2018.
  16. ^ Hanc, John (23 October 2019). "Illuminating the Plight of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 8 August 2020. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
  17. ^ a b Miranda, Carolina A. (12 January 2017). "The artist who made protesters' mirrored shields says the 'struggle porn' media miss point of Standing Rock". The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 27 December 2018.
  18. ^ "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.
  19. ^ Pratt, Stacy (10 May 2018). "Cannupa Hanska Luger Commemorates Missing and Murdered Native Women and Girls through Ceramic Beadwork". First American Art Magazine. Archived from the original on 11 June 2019. Retrieved 18 June 2019.
  20. ^ "Emerson Media Art Gallery presents Future Ancestral Technologies: nágshibi, an exhibition promoting global consciousness through indigenous science fiction". Emerson Today. 11 October 2019. Archived from the original on 25 October 2019. Retrieved 4 November 2019.
  21. ^ Barone, Joshua (28 February 2020). "An Opera About Colonialism Shows How History Warps". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 19 July 2021. Retrieved 19 July 2021.
  22. ^ "Sweet Land Is Awarded Best New Opera By The Music Critics Association Of North America". Shore Fire Media. Archived from the original on 2021-10-07. Retrieved 2021-10-07.
  23. ^ "Cannupa Hanska Luger". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on 2021-10-07. Retrieved 2021-10-07.
  24. ^ "Essential Arts: Indigenous views of the border in exhibitions in Arizona and New Mexico". Los Angeles Times. July 31, 2021. Archived from the original on 2021-10-07. Retrieved 2021-10-07.
  25. ^ "Cannupa Hanska Luger: Core Artist in Residence". c3:initiative: connecting creators and communities. Archived from the original on 4 November 2019. Retrieved 4 November 2019.
  26. ^ Keeler, Jacqueline (October 14, 2019). "Feature: A Frayed Knot, Afraid Not - The Two Stances to Indigeneity in the 21st Century". Pollen Nation Magazine. Archived from the original on 4 November 2019. Retrieved 4 November 2019.
  27. ^ Green, Christopher (11 July 2018). "DEMIAN DINÉYAZHI' & Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment (RISE)". The Brooklyn Rail (July–August 2018). Archived from the original on 25 January 2024. Retrieved 27 December 2018.
  28. ^ "NCECA 2015 Awards and Awardees". National Council on the Education of Ceramic Arts. Archived from the original on 28 December 2018. Retrieved 27 December 2018.
  29. ^ Miller, Leigh Ann (January 2019). "Awards". Art in America: 96.
  30. ^ "Cannupa Hanska Luger". Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. 28 June 2016. Archived from the original on 27 December 2018. Retrieved 27 December 2018.
  31. ^ "Cannupa Hanska Luger". Craft Research Fund. Archived from the original on 11 July 2020. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
  32. ^ "Cannupa Hanska Luger". Blade of Grass Foundation. Archived from the original on 3 August 2020. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
  33. ^ "MEET OUR 2022 FELLOWS". The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Archived from the original on 27 June 2023. Retrieved 8 April 2022.
  34. ^ "Artist: Cannupa Hanska Luger Lost Boy IV, from the series Never Neverland". Yale University Art Gallery. Archived from the original on 22 October 2020. Retrieved 2 August 2020.

External links edit

  • Official website
  • The artist fusing science fiction and Native ideas (short video)