Santa Fe artist wins inaugural $50,000 Burke Prize
New York City’s Museum of Arts and Design announced Tuesday that Cannupa Hanska Luger, a Santa Febased artist and activist, has won the inaugural $50,000 Burke Prize.
The award is for artists under the age of 45 working in the medium of glass, fiber, clay, metal or wood, and who use techniques developed by the American studio craft movement. The movement started in the United States after World War II with an emphasis on nontraditional methods and materials in rejection of industrial designs and mass-produced crafts from previous decades.
The award is named for collectors and longtime museum supporters Marian and Russell Burke. In a statement, Burke Prize juror Namita Gupta Wiggers said, “Cannupa Hanska Luger exemplifies craft as connected to the past as much as to the future.”
Luger, a Native artist from the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, rose to prominence in the art world for his dramatic large-scale projects that deal with socially conscious themes, such as his 2016 project Mirror Shields.
The project included mirrored objects designed for use by the protesters of the Dakota Access Pipeline near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. “This project was inspired by images of women holding mirrors up to riot police in the Ukraine, so that the police could see themselves,” he wrote in a statement about the project. Luger developed a tutorial for people to make their own mirror shields, and they have been used in resistance movements throughout the United States. Luger was named a “hero” of the local Santa Fe art scene by the Wall Street Journal in 2018. His bead project Every One is included in the Museum of Arts and Design exhibition The Burke Prize 2018: The Future of Craft Part 2, a show of works by all of the prize finalists. Every One was on exhibit at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe earlier this year. Luger collected 4,000 handmade beads from hundreds of communities nationwide for the project and used them to construct a large-scale Native portrait. Each bead represents a missing or murdered indigenous woman, girl, queer or transgender person, and the project is intended to honor victims of gender violence in Native communities.