When the pandemic shifted exhibitions around and forced artists and art enthusiasts indoors, Cannupa Hanska Luger and Marie Watt saw an opportunity for their joint exhibition at the Denver Art Museum. They turned to collaboration, and not just between each other, but between them and their followers.
Marie Watt (Seneca), Butterfly, 2015, reclaimed wool blankets, satin binding, thread, cotton twill tape and tin jingles, 94 x 126". Denver Art Museum: Funds from Loren G. Lipson, M.D., Vicki & Kent Logan, with additional funds from Brian Tschumper, Nancy Benson, Jan & Mike Tansey, and JoAnn & Bob Balzer, 2016.1A-B. © Marie Watt.
“Cannupa started putting out these short videos that taught a very simple task, like how to make a large clay bead and putting a hole in it,” says John P. Lukavic, the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Native Arts at the Denver Art Museum. “Suddenly, this all started to turn into this bigger idea about collaboration and working together. It was intriguing watching it form.”
The exhibition, Each/Other: Marie Watt and Cannupa Hanska Luger, opens May 23 in Denver and will feature 26 mixed media sculptures, wall hangings and large-scale installation works by Watt (Seneca, Scottish, German) and Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota and European), along with what the museum calls “new monumental artist-guided community artwork.”
Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota and European), Every One, 2018, ceramic, social collaboration, 12 x 15 x 3 ft. Photo courtesy of UCCS Galleries of Contemporary Art, Colorado Springs, CO.
Lukavic says almost all art is a collaborative process in some form. Painters for example rely on people to make their canvas or linen, artisans to make brushes or paints, and then others to frame the finished painting. “We ask visitors to re-think the way they see the world, to look at where we differ in life, examine what the process of making art does for them,” he adds. “It takes many hands to produce these works. So by inviting others to help we are saying they are contributors to something greater.”
Marie Watt (Seneca), Companion Species (Radiant), 2017, crystal and western maple base, 8 x 27 x 16". © Marie Watt. Photography © Kevin McConnell. Image courtesy of the artist.
Works include Watt’s fabric wall hangings that rely on in-person and virtual sewing circles, and Luger’s 2018 work Every One, which features 4,000 individually made clay beads. The clay beads—each one representing a missing person, many of them murdered Indigenous women, girls, queer and trans community members—were made by fans of the artist and those who follow him on social media. In another Luger piece, the Mirror Shield Project, the artist showed followers how to make mirrors on rectangular boards. The mirrors were later sent in 2016 to the water activists in Standing Rock, North Dakota, where they used them to reflect images of intense militarization back on the police force.
Installation of Cannupa Hanska Luger’s 2017 work This Is Not A Snake—made from ceramic, oil drums, ammunition cans and found objects—and Luger’s and Kathy Elkwoman Whitman’s 2018 collaboration The One Who Checks & The One Who Balances, made from ceramic, riot gear and afghan and wool surplus industrial felt. © Cannupa Hanska Luger. Image courtesy of the artist.
Other works in the exhibition include pieces made with wool blankets, carved wood, ceramic and fabric sculpture, glass beads, metal cones, photography, installation works with concertina and oil drums, video-based interpretive elements and documentation pieces to show past performance works by the artists.
Each/Other runs through August 22 at the Denver Art Museum.
May 23-August 22, 2021
Each/Other: Marie Watt and Cannupa Hanska Luger
Denver Art Museum
100 W. 14th Avenue Parkway, Denver, CO 80204
(720) 865-5000, www.denverartmuseum.org
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