Cannupa Hanska Luger

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Luger's installation, Every One, has been exhibited at the Museum of International Folk Art, the Gardiner Museum and the Denver Art Museum.

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.

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 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; 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.

In 2015 Luger received a Multicultural Fellowship Award from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts.

Luger 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.

In 2016 he received a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation.

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 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 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.

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, an artist fellowship from the Craft Research Fund, and A Blade of Grass Foundation fellowship for socially engaged art.

In 2020, his work was presented in the Larger than Memory: Contemporary Art from Indigenous North America, exhibition at the Heard Museum.

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 and which was awarded best new opera by the Music Critics Association of North America for 2020.

In 2021 Luger presented his debut solo exhibition in New York at Garth Greenan gallery titled New Myth, And presented the installation Something to Hold Onto addressing personal stories in relation to migration and border patrol issues at the southwest U.S. border.

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.

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.