Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina - March 22, 2025
Cannupa Hanska Luger: Speechless
nasher.duke.edu/exhibitions/speechless/
Cannupa Hanska Luger: Speechless explores and amplifies the problematic colonial history and the concept of cargo cults from an Indigenous perspective. Cargo cults developed as a result of Western military campaigns that sent crated, often airdropped, supplies to foreign lands inhabited by Indigenous peoples. During World War II, the US had a major military presence in the South Pacific. To many who lived there these objects falling from the sky seemed like wonderous gifts from the gods. Cults formed around the provisions that arrived from above, when in fact they were from the very forces that were colonizing Indigenous lands.
The exhibition features several monumental works by the artist, including The Keep, a large-scale radio tower made of pine trees, hand-made paper feathers, and found objects as well as two of the artist’s Transportable Intergenerational Protection Infrastructure (TIPI) works. Speaker towers, made from ceramic components, punctuate the installation and with the radio tower, represent tools of colonial power. Also included are eleven large Native American bustles, a traditional part of Native American powwow regalia, nine of which were created as part of Luger’s recent residency at Dieu Donné in New York, along with an immersive video, Future Ancestral Technologies: ++ a generation of new myth ++.
Speechless asks important questions relating to human agency, language, and means of control. Who gets to speak? Who must bite their tongue? Whose messages are muted? What meanings remain to be discovered? In Luger’s words, “communication is at the root of all ritual and technological development.” He asserts that the concept of the exhibition, acceptance of material (in any form), “flips the Western gaze back on itself to reflect that in present day North American culture, we are all in a cargo cult.”
The work presented here is part of Luger’s ongoing project, Future Ancestral Technologies (FAT) that explores Indigenous futures presented through a lens of speculative fiction. In the project, he probes how to share technology with his ancestors as the environment becomes an increasingly important, even desperate concern. Luger describes FAT as “a methodology, a practice, and a way of future dreaming that harnesses the power of science fiction to shape collective thinking and reimagine the future on a global scale.” The natural world is a critical element of this work as realized through the direct relationship he and his ancestors have with the land, the nomadic technologies Indigenous people develop, and the sacred places to which they form connections. Cumulatively, Luger’s work encourages us to think about the earth, not as a possession that humans dominate, but rather as something omnipresent with which humans must restore their bonds. “Sustaining ourselves means belonging to the environment,” he has said.
Cannupa Hanska Luger (b. 1979) is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota. Working with a wide array of media—video, performance, ceramic, textiles, found materials, and most recently paper—the artist activates cultural and social awareness relating to contemporary experience through his combinatory large-scale installations. He creates vivid aesthetic environments where Indigenous voices are amplified and rediscovered through the formulation of his inventive artistic vocabulary that counters a colonialist or anthropological gaze.
Cannupa Hanska Luger: Speechless is organized by the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.
___________________________________________
The Nasher Museum of Art (previously the Duke University Museum of Art) is the art museum of Duke University, and is located on Duke's campus in Durham, North Carolina, United States. In 1936, art collector William Hayes Ackland wrote letters to three universities, attempting to find a place to bequest his collection to upon his death. Duke University President William Preston Few was receptive to this idea, and had plans drawn up for an art museum at Duke.
After the death of both Few and Ackland, Duke refused to accept the gift, for reasons still not disclosed. Ackland's estate had to posthumously find a new location to build a museum, eventually creating the Ackland Art Museum.
In 1969, the university established the Duke University Museum of Art on Duke's East Campus with medieval art from the Ernest Brummer Collection.
In the later twentieth century, there was a push to move the location of the museum to a more central location. Professors of botany fought the plan because the new location would disturb the "botanical study area," a field of plants.
In the early twenty-first century, in part from a gift by alumnus Raymond Nasher, the museum became known as the Nasher Museum of Art and opened a new $24 million museum designed by architect Rafael Viñoly. Since its reopening, annual attendance is about 100,000 visitors.
Mary D.B.T., great-granddaughter of Benjamin Newton Duke, brother of James Buchanan Duke, and James H. Semans were major contributors to the university art museum. From 1987 to 2003, Michael Mezzatesta was the director and oversaw the construction of the museum's new site.[5] Sarah Schroth, former Nancy Hanks Senior Curator, is the director of the museum.
The Collection Galleries feature rotating installations of the Nasher Museum’s extensive holdings of historical art. Eight galleries, as well as the entrance to Wilson Pavilion, are dedicated to the museum’s strengths, which represent a brief history of human creativity from different times and parts of the world. Just beyond the entrance, visitors will find the Incubator, a flexible space for rotating student- and faculty-curated exhibitions. Visitors are invited to return again and again to The Collection Galleries, where Nasher curators continue to refresh the galleries with gems from the collection. The museum’s contemporary collection is showcased through rotating exhibitions within a separate pavilion. Works from the contemporary collection create new conversations and connections among historical works in The Collection Galleries.
Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina - March 22, 2025
Cannupa Hanska Luger: Speechless
nasher.duke.edu/exhibitions/speechless/
Cannupa Hanska Luger: Speechless explores and amplifies the problematic colonial history and the concept of cargo cults from an Indigenous perspective. Cargo cults developed as a result of Western military campaigns that sent crated, often airdropped, supplies to foreign lands inhabited by Indigenous peoples. During World War II, the US had a major military presence in the South Pacific. To many who lived there these objects falling from the sky seemed like wonderous gifts from the gods. Cults formed around the provisions that arrived from above, when in fact they were from the very forces that were colonizing Indigenous lands.
The exhibition features several monumental works by the artist, including The Keep, a large-scale radio tower made of pine trees, hand-made paper feathers, and found objects as well as two of the artist’s Transportable Intergenerational Protection Infrastructure (TIPI) works. Speaker towers, made from ceramic components, punctuate the installation and with the radio tower, represent tools of colonial power. Also included are eleven large Native American bustles, a traditional part of Native American powwow regalia, nine of which were created as part of Luger’s recent residency at Dieu Donné in New York, along with an immersive video, Future Ancestral Technologies: ++ a generation of new myth ++.
Speechless asks important questions relating to human agency, language, and means of control. Who gets to speak? Who must bite their tongue? Whose messages are muted? What meanings remain to be discovered? In Luger’s words, “communication is at the root of all ritual and technological development.” He asserts that the concept of the exhibition, acceptance of material (in any form), “flips the Western gaze back on itself to reflect that in present day North American culture, we are all in a cargo cult.”
The work presented here is part of Luger’s ongoing project, Future Ancestral Technologies (FAT) that explores Indigenous futures presented through a lens of speculative fiction. In the project, he probes how to share technology with his ancestors as the environment becomes an increasingly important, even desperate concern. Luger describes FAT as “a methodology, a practice, and a way of future dreaming that harnesses the power of science fiction to shape collective thinking and reimagine the future on a global scale.” The natural world is a critical element of this work as realized through the direct relationship he and his ancestors have with the land, the nomadic technologies Indigenous people develop, and the sacred places to which they form connections. Cumulatively, Luger’s work encourages us to think about the earth, not as a possession that humans dominate, but rather as something omnipresent with which humans must restore their bonds. “Sustaining ourselves means belonging to the environment,” he has said.
Cannupa Hanska Luger (b. 1979) is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota. Working with a wide array of media—video, performance, ceramic, textiles, found materials, and most recently paper—the artist activates cultural and social awareness relating to contemporary experience through his combinatory large-scale installations. He creates vivid aesthetic environments where Indigenous voices are amplified and rediscovered through the formulation of his inventive artistic vocabulary that counters a colonialist or anthropological gaze.
Cannupa Hanska Luger: Speechless is organized by the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.
___________________________________________
The Nasher Museum of Art (previously the Duke University Museum of Art) is the art museum of Duke University, and is located on Duke's campus in Durham, North Carolina, United States. In 1936, art collector William Hayes Ackland wrote letters to three universities, attempting to find a place to bequest his collection to upon his death. Duke University President William Preston Few was receptive to this idea, and had plans drawn up for an art museum at Duke.
After the death of both Few and Ackland, Duke refused to accept the gift, for reasons still not disclosed. Ackland's estate had to posthumously find a new location to build a museum, eventually creating the Ackland Art Museum.
In 1969, the university established the Duke University Museum of Art on Duke's East Campus with medieval art from the Ernest Brummer Collection.
In the later twentieth century, there was a push to move the location of the museum to a more central location. Professors of botany fought the plan because the new location would disturb the "botanical study area," a field of plants.
In the early twenty-first century, in part from a gift by alumnus Raymond Nasher, the museum became known as the Nasher Museum of Art and opened a new $24 million museum designed by architect Rafael Viñoly. Since its reopening, annual attendance is about 100,000 visitors.
Mary D.B.T., great-granddaughter of Benjamin Newton Duke, brother of James Buchanan Duke, and James H. Semans were major contributors to the university art museum. From 1987 to 2003, Michael Mezzatesta was the director and oversaw the construction of the museum's new site.[5] Sarah Schroth, former Nancy Hanks Senior Curator, is the director of the museum.
The Collection Galleries feature rotating installations of the Nasher Museum’s extensive holdings of historical art. Eight galleries, as well as the entrance to Wilson Pavilion, are dedicated to the museum’s strengths, which represent a brief history of human creativity from different times and parts of the world. Just beyond the entrance, visitors will find the Incubator, a flexible space for rotating student- and faculty-curated exhibitions. Visitors are invited to return again and again to The Collection Galleries, where Nasher curators continue to refresh the galleries with gems from the collection. The museum’s contemporary collection is showcased through rotating exhibitions within a separate pavilion. Works from the contemporary collection create new conversations and connections among historical works in The Collection Galleries.