Two years ago, I encountered the infamous 1892 image of two men with a hill of buffalo skulls at the Baltimore Museum of Art. It was covered by a small wall-mounted curtain designed by Yurok artist Stormi Turner, and it gave the image, still shocking after over a century of circulation, the depth of tragedy that it warranted. Part of the Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum exhibition, it was a way of acknowledging the care that such a crime demands, in the same way that human remains are shown in museums today, often with warnings, behind doors you must open, or under covers that you must actively remove to see. Turner’s intervention was a way to honor an animal that many Native American groups and communities lived in symbiotic relationship with for millennia. That image came back to me when I walked into Cannupa Hanska Luger’s newest exhibition, American Traditional, at Garth Greenan Gallery in Soho, where the artist sets aside the participatory, ceramics-heavy projects he’s best known for and arrives at something more declarative — a synthesis of wood, ink, and archive that is his strongest work yet.
In Mari Sandoz’s The Buffalo Hunters: The Story of the Hide Men, first published in 1954, she explains that North American bison, also called buffalo, were far more numerous than humans on the continent and there was “apparently no disease on all the continent that threatened the buffalo in any number.” That charmed existence for the largest land animal on Turtle Island was interrupted by the eventual arrival of European settlers, who with their horses, guns, and railroads made their slaughter into an industrial-scale activity.
Luger, who was born on the Standing Rock Reservation, places a black abstracted bison atop a blackened rendering of a 19th-century American wood dining table. An enrolled citizen of the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation, he has deep roots on the Great Plains, and he knows the history of destruction that tore the bison from the tribes of the region that was, as Sandoz put it, “almost the sole subsistence of the Plains Indian — his shelter, clothing, food and fuel.” The Cree scholar Tasha Hubbard goes further than Sandoz was able to. For Plains nations the buffalo were kin, part of the First Peoples rather than a separate species, and the campaign against them was, in her account, a genocide carried out by proxy and a “second major wave of trauma for Plains Indigenous peoples,” after epidemic disease. The army said as much. Hubbard quotes Colonel Richard Irving Dodge’s advice to hunters — “every buffalo dead is an Indian gone” — and General Philip H. Sheridan understood it before the historians did. In 1875, when the Texas legislature proposed a bill to protect the bison, buffalo hunter John R. Cook recorded Sheridan’s objection: “These men [the buffalo hunters] have done more to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years … Send them powder and lead if you will, but for the sake of a lasting peace let them kill, skin and sell until the buffalo are exterminated.”
The namesake work of the exhibition is a large effigy clearly influenced by Picasso’s monumental “Guernica” (1937), an artwork that continues to color our view of carnage well beyond the Spanish Civil War. You can see the linear monochromatic quality in the bison that echoes Picasso’s own bull, while the sumi ink the artist used on the surface gives it an austere quality that refuses the consolation of color. The resulting creation, like the other works in the gallery, appears to be the residue of a longer and slower process, spurning sensationalism. The charred effect recalls how bison bones were often burned to produce calcium carbonate and bone black, both used extensively in industrial production, whether for plaster, fertilizer, sugar refining, or water filtration. The beauty of the forms seduces you into almost forgetting that destruction, but that visual history is embedded into each element, including in the yarn that is fashioned to resemble bovine muscle.
The silent mammal sits atop the furniture, and a tongue hangs from each open drawer at either end, pulled out like a relic from a reliquary. They are the only parts of the beast that look as if they were ever alive. Luger’s older “Nostalgia” (2020), which this work is in dialogue with, according to the artist, elicits a type of mourning, depicting something destroyed, perhaps even wasted. The newer piece has a more specter-like presence, looking back at us with hollow eyes like a malformed sedentary beast furnished with legs of another type. The manner of wooden American furniture used here was ubiquitous for the artist growing up, and it’s a remnant of a historical period where the prominence of the furniture and the animal flipped.
In “Shoots Today, Kills Tomorrow” (2026), that harm is more visible, even if it resembles the aftermath of an attack with arrows piercing a display case. In the drawer of the vintage cabinet is a stash of buffalo nickels, also called “Indian nickels” for the composite portrait on the obverse by James Earle Fraser of a Native American — believed to be modeled after Oglala Lakota Chief Iron Tail, Cheyenne Chief Two Moons, and either Seneca actor Chief John Big Tree or Kiowa Chief Big Tree; accounts conflict. The coin’s bison was drawn from an animal at the Central Park Zoo — a member of what Hubbard has described as a buffalo diaspora, fenced in for urban enjoyment. The United States government issued the currency from 1913–38, before it was supplanted by the Jefferson nickel that continues to be issued until today.
Elsewhere, wooden elements, like in “Incubus” (2026), are repurposed. Ax handles become table legs, drawing parallels between the tools of the settler and the stately furnishings of elite homes. Like Fred Wilson’s “Mining the Museum” (1992–93) intervention that highlighted the connections between the objects smiths forged for genteel homes and the shackles that kept those homes running, Luger links the mundane with more nefarious possibilities, but rather than recontextualizing, he fabricates the evidence. Today, a popular German ax brand, Bison 1879, uses the mythology of the majestic animal to market itself, adding another layer of irony to the lingering symbolism of the American buffalo. Luger has also created a series of four Still Life (2026) wall works that not only play with the tradition of hunting trophies but also toy with the romantic lore of America visible in Georgia O’Keeffe’s many paintings of animal skulls.
American Traditional is the inaugural show at the gallery’s 10 Greene Street location, and the space has a far friendlier sun-drenched setting that bathes the work in natural light during the day, offering a warmer experience that softens the edges of these stark sculptures that play with shadow and shade. A September 12 performance by Luger, who played clay pipes of his own making, and composer Raven Chacon formed an aural counterpart — organic and synthetic mashed together in a shared aesthetic that finds beauty in hybridity.
The bison is absent from most accounts of American tradition, though part of that heritage was built on its bones. I asked Luger about that mismatch during the press preview, to which he responded that there’s “a huge gap between truth and honesty” in the tools of storytelling. Whether you see these artworks as one or the other may be based on your relationship to the skinned carcasses and the extent to which they agitate the value system that you’re rooted in.
Cannupa Hanska Luger: American Traditional continues at Garth Greenan Gallery (10 Greene Street, Soho, Manhattan) through October 24. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.