Public Lecture: Cannupa Hanska Luger

Cannupa Hanska Luger. Photo: Reece Martinez.

Cranbrook Academy of Art’s 2023-24 Public Lecture Series is free and open to the public in the deSalle Auditorium at Cranbrook Art Museum. Cranbrook Art Museum’s galleries are also free and open late on Thursdays. Please arrive early to see their current exhibitions before the lecture.

Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, New Mexico based artist Cannupa Hanska Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota heritage. Creating monumental installations, sculpture and performance to communicate urgent stories about 21st Century Indigeneity, Luger incorporates ceramics, steel, fiber, video and repurposed materials to activate speculative fiction, engage land-based actions of repair and practice empathetic response through social collaboration. Luger combines critical cultural analysis with dedication and respect for the diverse materials, environments, and communities he engages while provoking diverse audiences to engage with Indigenous peoples and values apart from the lens of colonial social structuring.

Luger is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of a 2021 United States Artists Fellowship Award for Craft and was named a 2021 GRIST Fixer. He 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 has exhibited nationally and internationally including at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gardiner Museum, Kunsthal KAdE, Washington Project for the Arts, Art Mûr, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. Luger holds a BFA in studio arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts and is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery in New York.

This Is Not A Snake One Who Checks One Who Balances. Heard Museum 2020.

Cannupa Hanska Luger 2021. Courtesy of the artists studio.