Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Lakota), a New Mexico-based artist, creates powerful works at the intersection of ancestral memory and future vision. Through sculpture, performance, and installation, Luger explores 21st-century Indigeneity using land-based practices, speculative fiction, and community collaboration.
Luger is a 2025 Eiteljorg Fellow, 2025 Ourworlds Award recipient, and 2024 Herb Alpert Award winner, and has previously received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, United States Artists, and more. His work has appeared at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, and internationally in the UAE, Shanghai, and Zurich. Some of his previous works include “GIFT (2023–24),” a site-specific critique of colonialism; “Sweet Land (2020),” an opera confronting settler narratives; “Every One (2018),” a memorial to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirits; and the “Mirror Shield Project (2016),” supporting resistance at Standing Rock. His work appears in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among other institutions.
Cultural Survival recently spoke with Luger to discuss the ideas and inspirations behind his work.
Cultural Survival: Did you face any challenges as a Native artist when you first started your career?
Cannupa Hanska Luger: Yes, just like any [marginalized] person would experience. As a Native person, there is a historical hurdle of us being a part of antiquity. Trying to forge a useful tool in the realms of what is our experience in the 21st century and into the future—that’s the more relevant conversation to me, but it wasn’t necessarily what the market was interested in when I started making work. Much of that comes from just being aware of what my mother had gone through in the Native art industry and questioning whether or not that remains relevant and why it is relevant. I think many challenges come from a population with their mind full of a mythical and/or false narrative around our culture and population.
CS: How does the connection to your ancestors influence your work?
CHL: I'm alive, so there's that. Based on American history, that's a miracle already. So I think that there is a connection to ancestry that is also mystified by the same narrative that trapped us in this historical context, which is that we are some sort of magical being. I'm all down with considering myself a magical being, but simultaneously we all are. Our connection to ancestry is constantly available and accessible. Access to that is easier [for some] and for others it's more difficult, but at the end of the day, it is constantly present and available. Ultimately, my customary knowledge around what it means to be anything at all is ingrained from a cultural context.
There is an awareness that I am no greater than any other living thing here, and in fact, on a temporal line, I'm only borrowing the air that I breathe, the water that I drink, and the space that I inhabit. I'm borrowing it not just from the environment, but future generations. And the privilege of that is entirely due to what my ancestors did in order to be here—the sacrifices made, the horrors endured, the glories reveled in—all are a part of what it means to be alive presently for anybody.
Cannupa Hanska Luger, Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2023. Ceramic, steel, leather, fur, fir, repurposed speaker boxes, repurposed military lockers, synthetic hair, hand blown glass, paint, 121 x 48 x 36 in. (335.3 x 121.9 x 91.4 cm).
CS: How do you view your work within the broader context of contemporary Native art?
CHL: There is a bit more pressure than, say, my European-American peers may have to face. I’m operating in the contemporary art field, and having access to that is a hard-won battle fought over generations. The public-facing part of my practice needs to be worthy of praise by my community, and that makes it challenging, but that challenge is a gift. Indian Country is not afraid to call you out on your shortcomings. Rather than that being depleting, I just see it as a gift. What other cultural group or other communities have that sort of access to their relations?
We are hundreds of different cultures, language groups, dances, and ceremonies. There are things that connect us for sure, but there are things that separate us by the land that you come from. I think it’s important to have those conversations, because in the public sphere of the American art canon, now that we are getting exposure in those spaces, I think we have to amplify the fact that we are not a monolith.
CS: The title of your exhibit, "Speechless," on view at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, invites powerful reflections on communication and control. How does this theme appear in the exhibition?
CHL: The overall exhibition “Speechless” was built out of a question that I was having in relation to the access and privilege that I have in institutional spaces where I'm invited to have a conversation. There is interest from one of the silos of the industry, whether that's curatorial or directorial, or maybe it's an extension of DEI. I started to feel like a virtue signal for American institutions, mostly because there wasn't any access when I came out of undergrad to these spaces without a master's degree and a commitment to the system at large. I never did get my graduate degree, but I did start working and doing a lot of talks and engagements at universities, and then museums. What I was seeing was an invitation to speak, but no commitment to act from the institution.
You can provide all of these solutions and ideas, but there is no guarantee that they will implement any of your suggestions, observations, critiques, or even solutions to the problem. I was starting to feel as though I wasn’t being heard. So, “Speechless” was like, you know what? It doesn't matter if you are a virtue signal for the institution, because at the end of the day, what if I am a signal for virtue? Not for the institution to show what it cared about in 2024-2025, but what future generations will be looking at in the historical art canon. You can provide them with awareness and access. It's not so much about what you say, but that you are communicating.
The way that I tried emphasizing this was through these enormous speaker stacks that look as though they would be kicking out tremendous sound, but no sound comes out of them. It's a silent exhibition and the visual motifs that are on the speaker stacks is a recurring theme of ‘bite your tongue.’ Several of the ceramic dishes have this motif embedded in them. As I was doing this, I was thinking about these bases in the World War II era that were being built in the remote islands in the Pacific and in Africa. As the armed forces were coming in, they were dropping paratroopers and cargo onto these sites and they would erect a radio tower. The Indigenous populations that were on that land were aware that all of this was happening, and at one point or another, they would make their own symbolic radio towers and emulate some of the marching and what not as dance.
My impulse was like, you're talking through your radio tower on an aircraft to drop off supplies. The only way these cargo flights are maintained is if it works, and if it works, who are they talking to? Whose technology is greater? By emulating your militarized actions and communicating to creation itself...this is the only way that we would perpetuate it. And so I'm like, maybe their technology is better. So as I was building these speakers, I was thinking about that concept. I wanted to rebuild the speaker based on trading all of the power for braids and daisy-chain these speakers together, thinking about how a braid is a record of our history in a place on the land. It truly is like a source of power. So I rebuilt these speakers modeling that perspective. At the exhibit, the audience has the expectation of sound, but there is no sound. And yet, they are still communicating quite loudly, visually, if not sonically.
Cannupa Hanska Luger, Wealth, 2023. Ceramic, synthetic hair, ammunition can, steel, artificial sinew, 24 x 14 x 12 in. (61 x 35.6 x 30.5 cm).
CS: Your work blends a wide range of materials. How do you decide which materials to use for a particular project?
CHL: What I can mess with is the material choices. Playing with those allows the audience to understand our present. What was once originally buffalo hide is now ‘traditional’ canvas. There’s this speculation in Indian Country that we can’t make it out of new materials, but we adapt so quickly and so well. Let’s get out of our own way and produce something marvelous. I use form and presentation to visualize the flexibility of Indigenous populations, how we adapt and thrive under apocalyptic circumstances.
CS: As a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of numerous prestigious awards, how do you view your work within the broader context of contemporary Native art?
CHL: There is a bit more pressure than, say, my European-American peers may have to face. I'm operating in a contemporary art field, and having access to that is a hard-fought battle from generations. Producing the objects the market demands, but also people operating in everything from curatorial spaces to philanthropy and education—collectively we have been working really hard to give me the access that I have presently.
The question that I'm often faced with is an extension of being a good ancestor; my career and the public-facing part of my practice needs to be worthy of praise by my community, and that makes it challenging, but that challenge is a gift. Indian Country is not afraid to call you out on your shortcomings. Rather than that being depleting, I just see it as a gift. What other cultural group or other communities have that sort of access to their relations?
There are people from Tribes that I have no affiliation with whatsoever who comment because whatever I'm doing may be contrary to the way that they do it. We are hundreds of different cultures, language groups, dances, and ceremonies. There are things that connect us for sure, but there are things that separate us by the land that you come from—this is what has created all of the protocols and taboos. I think it's important to have those conversations, because in the public sphere of the American art canon, now that we are getting exposure in those spaces, I think we have to amplify the fact that we are not a monolith.
Installation view of Cannupa Hanska Luger: Speechless. February 13 – July 06, 2025. Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. Photo by Brian Quinby.
CS: In “Speechless,” how do pieces like “The Keep” and “The TIPI” symbolize the complex relationship between Indigenous Peoples and colonial powers?
CHL: I'm Northern Plains, and we use tipis on both sides of my family. I've always struggled with the tipi being one of these blanket stereotype forms. I don't know how many cartoons I saw growing up of Indians with canoes, tipis, and totem poles, all in one village. I'm like, you’re kind of borrowing from three vastly different regions. Whenever I work with the tipi as form, there's always a little bit of hesitation or an internal cringe, like, am I reinforcing this narrative by working with this form? But at the end of the day, a tipi is a spaceship. It travels through space and provides shelter for its inhabitants. It's also a nomadic transportation infrastructure, which is so contrary to the colonial model of own, possess, and extract.
There is another way that worked for tens of thousands of years, not just in the U.S., but across the globe. And what—we all forgot? So putting a tipi up in the museum, for me, it's always been here and the museum put their building up around the tipi. I like putting these in those spaces because they transform from three-dimensional objects to two-dimensional objects. They are a visual lens for an important message: that what is true in the universe is true here on the land. They are literally a scientific illustration of the lensing of the cosmos. I think there is so much valuable Indigenous technology embedded in the tipi as a form, and it's the form that I can draw from even if it makes me cringe. It shouldn't, because I've spent too much time in a tipi to really feel the social pressure of representing in a museum context.
CS: What kind of conversations do you hope to spark?
CHL: It's two-fold. On one hand, I like being vague, I like the interpretation of my work by my audience. If it only registers as what I built it for, then I feel that I somehow failed as an artist. But if I can present it in a way that allows people to imagine differently or challenge even some of their own internal ideas and preferences, then I feel that's successful. Outside of them interpreting my intention, I'm more interested in their interpretation. If they catch me at the opening and they ask, ‘What does it mean?’ I'll ask them first: ‘You tell me what it means to you, then I'll tell you what it means to me.’ Because otherwise what do I gain?
Even through the academy itself, through education, there is a byproduct to access to knowledge that once you read a thing, you believe you're an expert on it. You memorized it, sure, but do you feel it? Do you understand it truly? Is it in fullness that you comprehend, or are you just regurgitating what you read somewhere, waiting for a gold star and a pat on the head? Even if they get it totally wrong and it's absolutely contrary to what my intention was, even if it reinforces the problems that I'm having, them thinking in that fashion tells me a lot more about them then I need to tell them about me. I don't get access to most of the people walking through the museum and having a moment, so please don't let it be just what I think. Whatever you think is more honest because I'm not there. You're there, you're experiencing it, and I can't really influence that. But I can accept it, and in acceptance I think there's great reward.
Top photo by Gabriel Fermin
