Cannupa Hanska Luger Exhibit Confronts Bison Genocide

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger 's latest exhibition, American Traditional, is currently on view at Garth Greenan Gallery in Soho, presenting a powerful synthesis of wood, ink, and archival material. This new body of work marks a departure from Luger's well-known participatory and ceramics-focused projects.

The exhibition echoes an earlier experience at the Baltimore Museum of Art two years prior, where an infamous 1892 image depicting two men with a pile of buffalo skulls was shown. This image, part of the Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum exhibition, was veiled by a small, wall-mounted curtain designed by Yurok artist Stormi Turner. Turner's intervention aimed to acknowledge the profound tragedy of the image and honor the bison, an animal with which many Native American groups maintained a symbiotic relationship for millennia. The presentation mirrored the respectful display of human remains in contemporary museums, often behind doors, under covers, or with explicit warnings.

Born on the Standing Rock Reservation and an enrolled citizen of the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation, Luger has deep connections to the Great Plains. His work, such as“Requiem” (2026), features a black, abstracted bison positioned atop a blackened 19th-century American wood dining table. This piece highlights the historical destruction of bison, which, according to Mari Sandoz 's 1954 book, The Buffalo Hunters: The Story of the Hide Men, were once more numerous than humans on the continent and faced no natural threats before the arrival of European settlers. Settlers, with their horses, guns, and railroads, industrialized the bison slaughter.

Cree scholar Tasha Hubbard expands on Sandoz's observations, stating that Plains nations regarded bison as kin, part of the First Peoples. Hubbard interprets the campaign against bison as a proxy genocide and a“second major wave of trauma for Plains Indigenous peoples” following epidemic diseases. Historical military figures openly acknowledged this strategy. Hubbard cites Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, who advised hunters:“every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” In 1875, General Philip H. Sheridan famously objected to a Texas legislature bill protecting bison. Buffalo hunter John R. Cook recorded Sheridan's statement:“These men [the buffalo hunters] have done more to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years... Send them powder and lead if you will, but for the sake of a lasting peace let them kill, skin and sell until the buffalo are exterminated.” Luger's piece,“Shoots Today, Kills Tomorrow” (2026), further explores these themes.

Source: Hyperallergic

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