Come to the Mesa Arts Center to see the collaborative, site-specific exhibition “Passage” by renowned multidisciplinary artist Cannupa Hanska Luger (Madan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, European).
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The centerpiece of the exhibition is “Something to Hold Onto”, Lugar’s second project from his Counting Coup series. This installation is made from 7,000+ 1-inch unfired clay beads, created by Arizona residents and national/international partners.
Each bead represents a lost life along the US-Mexico border in the last 30 years and is intended to humanize these staggering statistics. This installation mirrors a large-scale floor mural by Phoenix based artists Thomas “Breeze” Marcus (Tohono O’odham) and Dwayne Manuel (Onk Akimel O’odham) and is accompanied by artwork and a pop-up educational experience by Tanya Aguiñiga (Mexican) and journalistic documentation by Thosh Collins (Onk Akimel O’odham) and Chelsey Luger (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, Standing Rock Lakota Nation).
Canupa Hanska Luger is a New Mexico based multidisciplinary artist. He uses social collaboration in response to timely and site-specific issues. He produces multi-pronged projects that take many forms—through monumental installations that incorporate ceramics, video, sound, fiber, steel, new media, technology and repurposed materials. He interweaves performance and political action to communicate stories about 21st Century Indigeneity to provoke 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 is a recipient of a 2021 United States Artists Fellowship Award for Craft and was named a Grist 50 Fixer for 2021. He is also the recipient of a 2019 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grants, a 2019 Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Honoree and the recipient of the Museum of Arts and Design’s 2018 inaugural Burke Prize.
Timed tickets here.
Date: May 14 – August 8, 2021
Phone: +14806446500
Admission: FREE
Location:
DOBSON MAIN GALLERY
See you there!
