Cannupa Hanska Luger, Times Square MidnightMoment, 2025. Photo: Michael Hull.
Cannupa Hanska Luger, Times Square MidnightMoment, 2025. Photo: Michael Hull.

Cannupa Hanska Luger: Artist as Social Engineer

May 4, 2026, 6:00 pm

Bartos Theatre
MIT E15-070
Wiesner Building
20 Ames Street
Cambridge, MA 02142

In this lecture, Cannupa Hanska Luger will discuss how his interdisciplinary practice functions as a form of social engineering, developing new methodologies and speculative approaches that reflect Indigenous innovation. He will explore how storytelling, community engagement, and land-based practice inform his work, offering new ways of understanding identity, responsibility, and our shared humanity.

The event is free and open to the public, though registration is required. Register here.

 

Cannupa Hanska Luger, (Be)Longing in Nambe, New Mexico.
Cannupa Hanska Luger, This Is Not A Snake: One Who Checks One Who Balances, Heard Museum, 2020.
Cannupa Hanska Luger, Desert X 2025, installation view of G.H.O.S.T. Ride (Generative Habitation Operating System Technology). Photo: Lance Gerber, courtesy Desert X
Cannupa Hanska Luger, Midiigaadi. Light Bison. Photo: Brandon Soder, 2023
Cannupa Hanska Luger, We Survive You. Billboard for Freedoms. Mandan, North Dakota, 2021.
Images courtesy of the artist.

Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota) is an award-winning multidisciplinary 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 Reservation in North Dakota, he is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold.

Through large-scale installation, sculpture, performance, time-based media, and community engagement, Luger activates cultural continuity, ecological repair, and collective care. His bold visual storytelling builds frameworks for reimagining systems, grounding artistic practice in Indigenous worldviews, critical inquiry, and material experimentation.

Luger’s work has been presented nationally and internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Sharjah Biennial. His work is held in major public collections such as the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. He is a 2025 National Geographic Wayfinder Award recipient and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, among numerous honors.

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