Focusing on the works of two artists, Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/ Luiseño) and Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota), this installation features a pairing of single channel, video-based artworks. The works in this exhibition reflect on a sense of place that is grounded in indigenous realities and identity.

Drawing on the artists memories of places and spaces, each piece navigates a story of personal heritage, historical trauma, forgotten narratives, erased identities, and collective healing grounded in the land we live and walk on. Through visuals, sound, and sometimes text, these videos tell stories of survivance and adaptation, of activism, of a changing environment, a changing identity, of cycles, of movement, of the liminal space between the surreal and the grounded, of being from the land.

Organized by Fruitlands Museum, The Trustees, and curated by Tess Lukey, Associate Curator of Native American Art

About the Artists

Sky Hopinka is a Ho-Chunk visual artist and filmmaker based out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the homeland of the Ho-Chunk nation. Hopinka’s work deals with personal interpretations of homeland and landscape and the correlation between the language and culture of his home and the places he has lived. Creating visual collages through video, images, and sound Hopinka creates lived and virtual environments that stress the importance of his indigenous identity.

Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, the New Mexico based artist Cannupa Hanksa Luger creates monumental installations, sculpture, and performance works that communicate the urgent stories of 21st century indigeneity. Luger combines diverse materials, environments, and communities in his work in an effort to stress the importance of social collaboration. His land-based “actions of repair”, as he calls them, offer provoking insights into the lens of colonial social structuring.

Featured Image Caption: Cannupa Hanska Luger, We Live, Future Ancestral Technologies Entry Log, 2019, Single-channel video with audio, 02:57. Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. © Cannupa Hanska Luger