THE TRIENNIAL 2025
Cannupa Hanska Luger
Transmutation, 2025
Steel, white pine, resin, ribbons, and mesh fabric
Through his expansive multidisciplinary practice, Cannupa Hanska Luger crafts monumental installations, sculptures, and performances that give form to the urgent narratives of 21st-century Indigeneity.
Transmutation extends Luger’s ongoing interventions in public space, where speculative fiction, land-based restoration, and acts of collective empathy intertwine.
This work stands as both elegy and testament, mourning the loss of wild buffalo populations while honoring the enduring strength of Indigenous communities. Two towering portals, crowned with colossal buffalo skulls, frame a suspended mesh fabric adorned with thousands of ribbons, each one knotted and inscribed with messages by the hands of community members. In this shared ritual of remembrance and repair, the simple act of tying a ribbon becomes a gesture of solidarity, binding past, present, and future in an intricate weave of kinship and renewal.
Presented in partnership with University of Massachusetts Boston Arts on the Point and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program, Transmutation is a living memorial that calls upon the collective to reckon with loss, to celebrate resilience, and to take part in the ongoing work of healing.
Visible 24/7
University of Massachusetts Boston
University Hall, 100 Morrissey Blvd.
Boston, MA 02125
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Cannupa
Hanska Luger
b. 1979, based in New Mexico
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 the recipient of a 2024 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts and is a 2024 Monument Lab Fellow. He 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 Change Maker. Luger 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’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including for the 81st Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China, the National Gallery of Art, DC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the 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. Luger holds a BFA in studio arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts and is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery in New York.
