Cannupa Hanska Luger

Cannupa Hanska Luger (born 1979) is an interdisciplinary artist whose community-oriented artworks address environmental justice and gender violence issues.

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 (Fort Berthold Reservation) 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.

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

The artist'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.He has had seventeen 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.

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 of4,000 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.

While at IAIA, Luger was part of the Humble Collective in Santa Fe. In addition to the collaborations on the Mirror Shield, and Every One projects, Luger has 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.

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. In 2016 he was awarded with a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. In 2015 he received a Multicultural Fellowship Award from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts.

• North America Native Museum, Zürich, Switzerland
• Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO
• IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM
• Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, Norman, OK