‘We can imagine alternatives to the present’: Cannupa Hanska Luger on his show exhibition at the Joslyn Art Museum – The Art Newspaper

How do you map time in three dimensions? Cannupa Hanska-Luger’s new exhibition on the Joslyn Artwork Museum in Omaha, Nebraska asks that query in a choir of fabric tones, finding each concord and discordance in Indigenous futurity. Dripping Earth (till 8 March 2026) is an formidable enterprise, ushering viewers beneath water, over land and thru the magma-hot middle of historic turmoil. Luger, whose Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lokota lineage has lengthy knowledgeable his interdisciplinary apply, began his conceptual journey into Dripping Earth from an unlikely place to begin: the panorama watercolours of the Swiss artist Karl Bodmer (1809-93).

From 1832 to 1834, Bodmer adopted Prince Maximilian of Wied, an avowed German naturalist, on an expedition by North America, serving because the royal’s official documentarian. Bodmer’s sketches and work had been reworked into lithographs as soon as the pair returned to Europe, a priceless however fraught report of the Indigenous American tribal regalia and ceremonial traditions he witnessed throughout his travels. When these photographs had been translated from paper to print, liberties had been taken with the subject material within the type of “corrections”, each redacting and reimagining the already not possible reality of subjective expertise. The Joslyn Artwork Museum’s assortment consists of greater than 380 works by Bodmer.

Luger’s curiosity in colonisation’s violent legacy and its manifestation in pseudo-documentary supplies is tangible all through Dripping Earth, whether or not within the narrative reclamation of Bodmer’s legacy by the sequence of speculative lithographs Future Ancestral Applied sciences, or in large-scale formal experiments that flip rote symbolism on its head—like a large abacus within the form of a buffalo or repurposed, hand-woven bison regalia that toes a Marvel-ian line. A lot of the pure topology Bodmer captured in his watercolours of the Missouri River is now submerged, however Luger doesn’t contemplate that historical past “misplaced”; quite, he says, that is nature’s reabsorption of the storytelling equipment, a proper rejection of the settler perspective in direction of “terra incognita”.

Luger was born and raised on the North Dakota Standing Rock Reservation, and discovered about stone carving and ceramics from his mom, Kathy “Elk Girl” Whitman. He obtained a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and has proven his work at museums everywhere in the world, together with the Princeton College Artwork Museum, the Museum of Northern Arizona, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Artwork. He’s a recipient of the Burke Prize from the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and his famend set up, Each One, a cascade of 4,000 handmade ceramic beads forming a collective portrait of murdered and lacking Indigenous girls from throughout North America, has been exhibited on the Gardiner Museum, the Museum of Worldwide Folks Artwork, and the Denver Artwork Museum.

The Artwork Newspaper caught up with Luger to speak about lithography, unreliable narration and the artwork of counting.

The Artwork Newspaper: How did you come throughout the work of Karl Bodmer, and what prompted your response to it?

Cannupa Hanska Luger: Why I used to be actually enthusiastic about doing this exhibition was that Karl Bodmer and Prince Maximilian ended up staying with the Mandans for a very long time. Within the lithographs and in his watercolours, there’s plenty of materials from that keep. And that is my tribe, you recognize? After smallpox worn out like 90% of our inhabitants, plenty of our customary practices changed into survival mode. And Bodmer’s illustrations I keep in mind taking a look at rising up as a degree of reference for a few of our customary visible language. So there was this connection to Bodmer’s work. After all, George Catlin got here by as effectively, after which you could have Lewis and Clark tangled within the American story. However a lot of it’s legendary at this level that it is good to have these bodily recollections gathered at the moment quite than shifting by the sport of phone that’s historical past.

I used to be enthusiastic about doing this work and interesting with the watercolours as a result of I grew up seeing the lithographs. By way of the method of commentary, by the method of replica, there are little artifacts that get left heind. And once I noticed the unique watercolours and will examine them in opposition to the lithographs, which I grew up seeing, there have been a bunch of fascinating issues that I used to be taking discover of.

For this reason I used to be sort of enthusiastic about doing a lithographic sequence as a result of I’ve had the chance to do them a number of instances and I’ve handed on it as a result of I actually did not perceive how a sculptor engages with printmaking. On this occasion, the method of printmaking felt like a medium to work with. I needed to breed the watercolours in lithographs, that are from Bodmer’s guide of landscapes, the sequence that he was calling Exceptional Landscapes. Within the guide the place I used to be first engaged with these landscapes, there was a subnote and it described the variety of them that at the moment are submerged beneath dam tasks. And my rez is a kind of dam tasks: 40 % of my reservation is beneath Lake Sacagawea, so the landscapes that I selected for the backgrounds of these lithographs are submerged.

I needed to construct this narrative that tracks the processes through which we mass-produce tales, and the way that impacts the final psyche, and navigate these two definitions of artefact: one, an object of cultural significance; and two, an anomaly produced by commentary. That’s why I did the lithographs and why the lithographs look the best way they do. The backgrounds, the watercolours, we turned them to a greyscale and used a 4 plate drop to get a very wealthy grey tone. The determine on the highest of it’s performed in an enormous halftone dot. In wanting on the histories of printmaking and my publicity to printmaking and eager about comedian books, the figures are very heroic of their stances.

What’s your relationship with materiality as an artist?

I am fairly agnostic with regards to supplies, the story that the supplies deliver to any of those conversations. If I specialise, I solely get to inform that story. But when I turn into slightly adept at a bunch of issues, then it opens up the likelihood to have deeper tales. A whole lot of this exhibition is about materials, materials science and in addition how the historical past of conventional and customary practices transfer by time and thru supplies. With the ability to inform a really outdated story with new supplies tells us one thing in regards to the company of Indigenous those that has been stifled as a part of the historic report. For this reason there’s so many alternative supplies that I am working with on this exhibition. They’ve their very own tales to inform and people supplies do it higher than I can.

May you inform me extra in regards to the big abacus?

Other than the supplies as an expressive factor, on the finish of the day, it is a self-portrait. These are methods that I have been creating as a person within the continuum of expertise and whatnot. One of many tasks that I’ve performed in my profession are these items that I name Counting Coup; it is actually information visualisation and engineering tasks, making an attempt to create prompts for folks to take part within the creation of a chunk. This big abacus is the most recent iteration of a Counting Coup undertaking; it is a bison bead undertaking and that accumulation of ceramic beads which might be being constructed by group members are calculating the wild bison in North America. When that bison is full, it is a three-dimensional dot matrix presentation, and it’ll encompass round 20 ,000 beads, which is the variety of wild free bison in North America presently.

I have been wanting to construct this sculpture for years, which is wild. I pitched this bison bead undertaking perhaps 5 – 6 years in the past. The Joslyn, fortunately, noticed my concept and noticed how it might profit their connection and reinforce the group relationships that they’ve, in order that they’re serving to to steward the undertaking on this iteration.

Do you’re feeling that your function as an artist entails educating the viewer?

I do not know if it might be schooling. I am extra enthusiastic about inspiration than schooling. I like how a viewer interprets work, so I attempt to paint with as broad a stroke as potential and invite the viewer and their histories into the method in order that they full it, but additionally construct a bridge between all of their experiences and all of my experiences, after which all of their group and all of my group. Construct an imaginary bridge first in order that we will finally over time assemble one thing that is significant.

I prefer to remind those that we will think about options to the current and that’s really the definition of what freedom might be—not having the ability to select however to create one—and I feel we’re missing in that proper now. So if this evokes any individual to think about themselves in a unique place or time, or it evokes them to contemplate one other means of constructing, describing one thing that they wish to speak about, that is nice. And in the event that they misconstrue the message that I am presenting to them, and it turns into one thing alternate to it, that’s really profoundly extra generative than them understanding precisely what it’s I am making an attempt to precise.

Nonlinearity is a giant a part of how this present strikes. How vital was that to you, and the way do you logistically talk non-linear time to guests?

That was one thing that I used to be actually enthusiastic about merely due to this relationship that I’ve to Bodmer’s work after which the Joslyn having that work and all of the bizarre synchronicities within the timeline that I attempted to have fun on this exhibition. There are two little items that aren’t that large and daring, however they’re these picket oars for our customary bull boats. I used to be in Switzerland this summer time and occurred throughout a beam from a transform in Verbier, that beam was hewn and set within the 1860s, so this tree was alive within the 1830s, which is strictly when Bodmer was up the river. There are these two oars that had been constructed from a tree that was alive on the similar time of this storyline. I am like, “How is it that I am right here now and that this materials is accessible?”

It reinforces this notion that linear time is a assemble and we really are members in a space-time continuum. I’m this factor radiating in all instructions. If house and time are related, then we should always be capable to navigate in any route. And in reality, we do. It may not be a bodily transportation, however a fourth-dimensional motion.

Coincidentally, these beams had been obtainable to me, so I felt charged and primed to carve them from this wooden, regardless that I’ve by no means carved an oar, or actually labored with wooden in that means. It simply appeared like the chance to precise the sphericalness of time. The whole lot that I do know was discovered generations in the past and moved by the timeline to me presently and I am simply an extension of that newest presentation and something that I make goes to additionally transfer by that point and be a degree of reference for generations that are not even born but.

Dripping Earth: Cannupa Hanska Luger, till 8 March 2026, Joslyn Artwork Museum, Omaha, Nebraska