A collaborative art workshop led by Picker Art Gallery's Artist-in-Residence Cannupa Hanska Luger, open to the Colgate community, Haudenosaunee people, and local residents. The artworks created in the workshop will  be incorporated into Luger’s current social collaborative project. See Each/Other, Something to Hold Onto, Mirror Shield Project for similar projects).

In the US during the 1800s, bison were slaughtered to near extinction by settlers in an attempt to eradicate a natural resource vital to Indigenous communities of the Great Plains. Today, there are approximately 20,000 plains bison managed as wildlife. Each bead will represent one bison, and the installation will shed light on the importance of wild bison conservation and how environmental destruction continues to impact Indigenous communities.

This is the third project in Luger’s Counting Coup series, which aims to utilize social collaboration to re-humanize large and abstract data through the process of creating handmade clay objects.

Luger is a New Mexico-based multidisciplinary artist who uses social collaboration in response to timely and site-specific issues. Raised on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, he is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Lakota descent. Luger produces multi-pronged projects that take many forms—through monumental installations that incorporate ceramics, video, sound, fiber, steel, new media, technology, and repurposed materials, Luger interweaves performance and political action to communicate stories about twenty-first-century Indigeneity. This work provokes diverse audiences to engage with Indigenous peoples and values apart from the lens of colonial social structuring, and often presents a call to action to protect land from capitalist exploits. He combines critical cultural analysis with dedication and respect for the diverse materials, environments, and communities he engages.

For more information about the artist, please visit http://www.cannupahanska.com/.

Picker Art Gallery will also be open Saturday, April 9th from 10am-5pm to view Cannupa's work in his current exhibition Rounds.

This programming is generously sponsored by the Colgate Arts Council with additional support from the Museum Studies Program, Department of Art and Art History, Film and Media Studies Program, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Communities and Identities, Core 152, Native American Studies Program, Environmental Studies Program, and the First-Year Seminar.