Cannupa Hanska Luger Featured in The New York Times Magazine

Early in his career, the artist Cannupa Hanska Luger realized that his Indigenous ancestors would not have had words to describe his work — that the objects they made, however beautifully embellished, were always created with some purpose in mind. Before white anthropologists recast them as aesthetic treasures and displayed them in museums and private collections, beaded bison-hide sacks were meant for carrying things, and Pueblo pots for storing or cooking food. Luger, who is 43, spent years of his artistic life grappling with the fetishizing of Native objects. Then something similar happened to his own work.

Luger lives in Glorieta, N.M., near Santa Fe, and in the summer of 2016, he was doing well as an artist, having just sold an eight-foot-tall ceramic-and-steel figure he called Nature to the Denver Art Museum for $30,000. His father is among the Sioux residents of Standing Rock Indian Reservation, which straddles the border separating North and South Dakota; Luger spent his early childhood there and still visits regularly. When community members faced violent resistance for opposing the construction of an oil pipeline near the reservation that could threaten their water supply, Luger decided to take a break from making art to create something that people could use to defend themselves against police batons and projectiles.

He emerged from his workshop with a shield that had a reflective outer surface, a way of forcing law enforcement to confront their own aggression. It became the basis of an open-source experiment called The Mirror Shield Project, for which he filmed a video tutorial that he posted online. Word spread on social media, and soon people were making their own mirror shields to send to protesters on the reservation. Luger worried that the authorities might confiscate the shields, calling them weapons. So, being intimately familiar with the back roads into the reservation, he got in a van and drove 500 of them there with a partner, the Native artist Rory Wakemup.

“It wasn’t, like, art,” Luger said. “I’d seen too many people getting shot with percussion grenades, being shot directly with tear-gas canisters.” One person could make enough shields to protect several frontline protesters, he figured, and if those protesters shielded everyone behind them, then thousands at the camp might be safer because of his efforts. Yet Luger is an artist, even at his most practical, and by disguising his activism as performance art he inadvertently attracted attention from journalists, gallerists and art collectors — more attention, it turned out, than any of the pieces he previously made for sale.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, an influential curator and the artistic director at the Serpentine gallery in London, discovered Luger through The Mirror Shield Project and said the video guidance reminded him of Marcel Duchamp’s Unhappy Readymade. In the year before the Standing Rock protests, Luger participated in shows at five galleries; in the year after, he did 19 of them. In 2018, he won the inaugural Burke Prize for contemporary craft from the Museum of Arts and Design, which exhibited The Mirror Shield Project alongside some of Luger’s newer work.

By 2020, Luger had made a leap even some of the most prominent Native American artists never manage, from selling his pieces through a gallery in Santa Fe to working with one based in Manhattan, the Garth Greenan Gallery, where buyers outside the silo of American Indian art collecting might see it. This past April, Luger was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship; in May, he led a workshop on making mirror shields at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where, on June 23, The Mirror Shield Project will be part of a water-themed group exhibition conceived by the first Indigenous curator in the museum’s 150-year history, Patricia Marroquin Norby.

When I encountered Luger’s work for the first time late last year — an installation called Every One — I was transfixed. Conceived as a response to a June 2019 report from the Canadian government on missing and murdered Indigenous women, Every One is a monumental work. It consists of more than 4,000 fist-size ceramic beads hung to form what looks like a pixelated black-and-white portrait of an Indigenous woman; each bead represents one of the missing or murdered women, while the portrait, based on the tintype photograph Sister, by Kali Spitzer, represents the loved ones left to suffer in their absence.

Luger told me that while creating the piece, he recited aloud the same prayer each time he fired one of its ceramic beads in his kiln: “This is too many. This is enough. This has to stop.” For him, this ritual was the point of it all: to memorialize as individuals those who had been consigned to the mass grave of a government report on genocide.

Luger’s Native predecessors, like Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Allan Houser and T.C. Cannon, spent their careers fighting long-held stereotypes that had confined Native artists to the world of crafts and kept them out of the mainstream art market; Luger and peers like Nicholas Galanin, as part of a generation of Native artists embraced by the fine-arts community, must instead reckon with what that market wants from them and what it is they want to be selling.

When Luger was 4, his parents divorced, and the reservation eventually became a place he only visited. He and his four siblings went to live with their mother, the artist Kathy Whitman-Elk Woman, who moved with them to the Black Hills for a time before settling in Santa Fe in order to make a better living. It was a transient childhood, with stints in New Mexico and Arizona, but always tethered to the Santa Fe Indian Market, where his mother sold her beadwork, paintings and sculptures at a booth each August.

After graduating from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2011, Luger invested in his future as an artist by working on a marijuana farm in Paradise, Calif., with his girlfriend at the time, the artist Ginger Dunnill, earning enough money to buy a small plot of land in Glorieta. When he and Dunnill returned, they married and built the home where they now live with their two children.

In August 2013, the I.A.I.A. Museum of Contemporary Native Arts hosted his first major solo exhibition, called Stereotype: Misconceptions of the Native American, which explored how media representations flatten Indigenous identity. Luger sold many pieces through Blue Rain Gallery in Santa Fe, where he learned to engage playfully with “the white gaze,” making anthropomorphic bear, elk and coyote figurines from clay draped in beads and feathers from Hobby Lobby — a way of selling white collectors “a tongue-in-cheek regurgitation of their expectations.”

Luger’s most recent works, including Rounds — 72 ceramic bullets cast from several molds, then fired and painted in decorative motifs — and Dance Clubs — sculptures joining ceramic reproductions of gas-pump handles to flat hardwood blades — reflect Luger’s interest in recasting harmful objects of colonization as purely aesthetic ones, a reference to how white collectors have done the same to Indigenous crafts.

More than once, Luger told me our survival is a threat to the “myth of America,” because our existence is a reminder of the illegitimate land claims this country was built on. He and the Seneca Nation artist Marie Watt were invited by one of Yale’s residential colleges to build a monument on campus, in acknowledgment of the fact that it was once Indigenous land. They suggested a machine that would flatten ordinary coins into badges reading: “I ACKNOWLEDGED INDIGENOUS LAND TODAY,” connected like a tapestry and turned into an artwork by Yale, whose covered land would then belong to the descendants of the tribes it was stolen from.

Luger told me it was about healing their trauma with the land and our trauma with them. “I don’t see them as provocations. I see them as opportunities,” Luger said. “I’m giving them a gift. I’m giving them the opportunity to make themselves whole again.”

— Joshua Hunt