Cannupa Hanska Luger

In 2019 his work was presented in a one-person exhibition and performance piece, A Frayed Knot/Afraid Not, and an interactive program, Something to Hold Onto, addressing personal stories in relation to migration and border patrol issues at the southwest U.S. border. He also had a solo exhibition, Future Ancestral Technologies: nágshibi, dealing with Indigenous science fiction, at the Emerson College Media Art Gallery.

He organized the Lazy Stitch exhibition at the Ent Center for Contemporary Art, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, Galleries of Contemporary Art in 2018.

In 2018, the artist was awarded with the first Burke Prize for American studio crafts from the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. In 2016 he was awarded with a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. In 2015 he received a Multicultural Fellowship Award from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts.

Lugar is well known for his Mirror Shield Project deployed at the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock in 2016. He designed and fabricated 100 easily-made, inexpensive masonite and mirrored-vinyl shields, and posted an instructional video of the fabrication process on social media. A Minneapolis-based group made 500 additional shields with help from Jack Becker of the non-profit organization, Forecast Public Art, and Rory Wakemup from the Minneapolis organization, All My Relations Arts, who facilitated a workshop by the artist.

The artist's large-scale installations, social sculptures and performances use video, sound, and a range of sculptural materials to engage in "political activism in order to communicate stories about twenty-first-century indigeneity." His work has been exhibited at the Princeton University Art Museum, Museum of Northern Arizona, the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Center for Visual Arts, Denver, and the Galerie Orenda in Paris, France, as well as the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City that honored him with the inaugural Burke Prize. He has had seventeen solo exhibitions including his 2013 show at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Cannupa Hanska Luger Stereotype: Misconceptions of the Native American.

In 2011, Luger received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in studio arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Cannupa Hanska Luger (born 1979) is an interdisciplinary artist whose community-oriented artworks address environmental justice and gender violence issues.