→Cannupa Hanska Luger

Biography

Cannupa Hanska Luger is an award-winning artist and cultural innovator whose expansive creative and philosophical practice introduces new methodologies, ideas, and speculative technologies that reflect Indigenous innovation and shift collective thinking. Born on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota, Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara) and Lakota. His bold visual storytelling offers new ways of seeing our shared humanity while centering an Indigenous worldview. With a socially engaged, interdisciplinary practice spanning public art, large-scale installation, ceramic sculpture, performance, time-based media, writing, and land-based actions of repair, Luger’s work blends critical cultural analysis with Indigenous advocacy and deep respect for the diverse materials, landscapes, and communities he engages. Luger has been featured on the cover of National Geographic and profiled in The New York Times Magazine and Art21. He was named a Grist climate leader for driving fresh solutions to our planet’s most pressing challenges and is the recipient of numerous honors recognizing his groundbreaking work. Luger is the 2026 recipient of the prestigious PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide (Aora Press). In 2025, he received a National Geographic Society Wayfinder Award and was named a National Geographic Explorer. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Art from Maine College of Art & Design (2025), the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts (2025), the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship (2025), and the Ourworlds Immersive Visual Arts Award (2025). Additional honors include the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (2024), Monument Lab Fellowship (2024), Soros Arts Fellowship (2023), Guggenheim Fellowship (2022), United States Artists Fellowship (2021), Creative Capital Fellowship (2020), Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020), Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Award (2019), and a he was the recipient of the Museum of Arts and Design’s inaugural Burke Prize (2018). His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including Times Square Arts Midnight Moment (New York, NY), the Sharjah Biennial 16 (Sharjah, United Arab Emirates), the 81st Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (Shanghai, China), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), the Gardiner Museum (Toronto, Canada), Kunsthal KAdE (Amersfoort, Netherlands), the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights (Atlanta, GA), among others. Luger’s work is held in numerous public collections, including the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC); the Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, MI); the Nordamerika Native Museum (Zürich, Switzerland); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA); and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA). He is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery (New York, NY) and maintains a studio practice in Glorieta, New Mexico.