Cannupa Hanska Luger (b.1979) is a New Mexico based multidisciplinary artist creating monumental installations, sculpture and performance to communicate urgent stories of 21st Century Indigeneity. Incorporating ceramics, steel, fiber, video and repurposed materials, Luger activates speculative fiction, engages in land-based actions of repair and practices empathetic response through social collaboration. Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota. Luger combines critical cultural analysis with dedication and respect for the diverse materials, environments, and communities he engages. His bold visual storytelling presents new ways of seeing our collective humanity while foregrounding an Indigenous worldview. 

Luger is a 2023 SOROS Arts Fellow, 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 National Gallery of Art, DC, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Kunsthal KAdE, Netherlands, Art Gallery of Alberta, Canada, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas, and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Georgia, among others. Luger holds a BFA in studio arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts and is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery in New York.

Notable works by Luger include Sweet Land (2020), an award-winning multi-perspectival and site-specific opera produced through The Industry and staged at the State Historical Park in downtown Los Angeles, for which he was co-director and costume designer; The MMIWQT Bead Project (2018), a social collaboration resulting in the monumental sculptural installation Every One, composed of over 4000 individual handmade clay beads created by hundreds of communities across the U.S. and Canada to re-humanize the data of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, queer and trans community members; and The Mirror Shield Project (2016), a social engagement work which invited the public to create mirrored shields for water protectors at Standing Rock and which has since been formatted and used in various resistance movements across the nation. 

Cannupa Hanska Luger simultaneously addresses cultural loss and cultural sustenance, memory and interpretation, concrete form and craft as action. In a world wrought with conflict, he illuminates the strength and unity that come through craft’s capacity to engage communities, empower participation, and flourish in contexts within and outside of the museum setting.” - Namita Gupta Wiggers, Director of Critical and Historical Craft Studies at Warren Wilson College and Director and Co-Founder of the Critical Craft Forum