Cannupa Hanska Luger

Cannupa Hanska Luger (b.1979) is a New Mexico based multidisciplinary artist creating monumental installations, sculpture and performance to communicate urgent stories of 21st Century Indigeneity. Incorporating ceramics, steel, fiber, video and repurposed materials, Luger activates speculative fiction, engages in land-based actions of repair and practices empathetic response through social collaboration. Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota. Luger combines critical cultural analysis with dedication and respect for the diverse materials, environments, and communities he engages. His bold visual storytelling presents new ways of seeing our collective humanity while foregrounding an Indigenous worldview. 

Luger is the recipient of a 2024 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts and is a 2024 Monument Lab Fellow. He is a 2023 SOROS Arts Fellow, a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of a 2021 United States Artists Fellowship Award for Craft and was named a 2021 GRIST Change Maker. Luger is a 2020 Creative Capital Fellow, a 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, and the recipient of the Museum of Arts and Design’s 2018 inaugural Burke Prize, among others.

Luger’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including for the 81st Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China, the National Gallery of Art, DC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Kunsthal KAdE, Netherlands, Art Gallery of Alberta, Canada, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas, and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Georgia. Luger holds a BFA in studio arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts and is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery in New York.

Notable projects by Luger include GIFT (2023-2024), a monumental, experimental, time-based public artwork and multi-year collaboration between Luger, Monument Lab and the University of Michigan Museum of Art in which Luger uncovered the relationship between the museum, the land it stands on, and the long histories of colonial narratives deeply embedded in public structures. Sweet Land (2020), an award-winning multi-perspectival and site-specific opera produced through The Industry and staged at the State Historical Park in downtown Los Angeles, for which he was co-director and costume designer; The MMIWQT Bead Project (2018), a social collaboration resulting in the monumental sculptural installation Every One, composed of over 4000 individual handmade clay beads created by hundreds of communities across the U.S. and Canada to re-humanize the data of missing and murdered Indigenous community members; and The Mirror Shield Project (2016), a social engagement work which invited the public to create mirrored shields for water protectors at Standing Rock and which has since been formatted and used in various resistance movements across the planet.