This is a Humanities Common Lecture for UNC Asheville students and faculty. The class is free and open to the public to attend. See below for details on parking a links to a campus map.

“As a contemporary artist Indigenous to North America, I am motivated to reclaim and reframe a more accurate version of 21st century Native American culture and its powerful global relevance.”

–Cannupa Hanska Luger

Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, New Mexico based artist Cannupa Hanska Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota heritage. Creating monumental installations, sculpture and performance to communicate urgent stories about 21st Century Indigeneity, Luger incorporates ceramics, steel, fiber, video and repurposed materials to activate speculative fiction, engage land-based actions of repair and practice empathetic response through social collaboration. Luger combines critical cultural analysis with dedication and respect for the diverse materials, environments, and communities he engages while provoking diverse audiences to engage with Indigenous peoples and values apart from the lens of colonial social structuring.

Luger is 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 Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gardiner Museum, Kunsthal KAdE, Washington Project for the Arts, Art Mûr, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. Luger holds a BFA in studio arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts and is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery in New York.

This event is held in conjunction with Mįhą́pmąk, a solo exhibition of 2020 Craft Research Fund Artist Fellow Cannupa Hanska Luger on view at the Center for Craft (Asheville, NC) through January 28, 2023. The exhibition features ceramics, research ephemera, and documentation from the past two years of his ongoing research project to recover his ancestral, Mandan clay traditions. This exhibit was recently reviewed in Art in America.

The lecture is in the Mullen James Lecture Hall at the University of North Carolina Asheville. For a Campus Map, see: https://maps.unca.edu/

For parking instructions, see "Visitors": https://www.permitsales.net/UNCA

This event is presented in partnership by Center for Craft, Center for Native Health, Museum of the Cherokee Indian, and University North Carolina Asheville.