DENVER, CO.- The Denver Art Museum is presenting Each/Other: Marie Watt and Cannupa Hanska Luger, the first exhibition to feature together the work of Watt and Luger, two leading Indigenous contemporary artists whose processes both focus on collaborative artmaking. Exploring the collective process of creation, Each/Other features 26 mixed media sculptures, wall hangings and large-scale installation works by Marie Watt (Seneca, Scottish, German) and Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota and European), along with a new monumental artist-guided community artwork. While each artist’s practice is rooted in collaboration, they have never before worked together or been exhibited alongside one another in a way that allows audiences to see both the similarities and contrasts in their work. Curated by John P. Lukavic, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Native Arts at the DAM, this exhibition is on view through Aug. 22, 2021, in the Gallagher Gallery on Level 1 of the DAM’s Hamilton Building.
“We are honored to serve as a platform for the incredible work of Marie Watt and Cannupa Hanska Luger, and to bring their collaborative approach to artistic creation to our community,” said Christoph Heinrich, Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the DAM. “This exhibition underscores the museum’s ongoing commitment to supporting, presenting and collecting contemporary artists from Indigenous communities and around the world. This project with Watt and Luger offers the unique opportunity for us to invite the public to participate in the creative artmaking process and display the resulting work for all visitors to experience.”
Watt’s work draws primarily from history, biography, Iroquois proto-feminism and Indigenous principles, often addressing the interaction of the arc of history with the intimacy of memory. Based in Portland, Oregon, Watt was a Native Arts Artist-in-Residence participant at the DAM in 2013. Butterfly, a large-scale and visitor favorite artwork by Watt, was acquired by the DAM in 2015 and is on view in Each/Other. Her primary materials are often everyday objects that can carry extraordinary histories of use, such as blankets, which in her tribe (Watt is an enrolled citizen of the Seneca Nation) are given to those who bear witness to important life events. In working with blankets, her process is both solitary and collaborative; her small works are often personal meditations and her larger works are made in community, notably in “sewing circles,” public events in which the fellowship and storytelling that takes place can be more important than the resulting object.
Luger is a New Mexico-based, multi-disciplinary artist. Using social collaboration in response to timely and site-specific topics, Luger produces multi-pronged projects that take many forms. Through monumental installations that incorporate ceramics, video, sound, fiber, steel and repurposed materials, Luger interweaves performance and political action to communicate stories about 21st century Indigeneity. Nature, acquired by the DAM in 2015, along with other recent notable works by Luger are on view in Each/Other, including a monumental sculptural installation from 2018 titled Every One. Created by people from hundreds of communities across the U.S. and Canada, this socially collaborative work is composed of over 4,000 individual handmade clay beads—each one representing a person who has been lost—and aims to re-humanize the data of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, queer and trans community members.
“Collaboration and the creative process are central to this exhibition and each of the artist's work,” says curator Lukavic. “In today’s society, value is placed primarily on the noun ‘art’ and not the verb form, or act of creating. Together, Watt and Luger show us the ways in which art moves beyond the end-product, beyond a static or luxury item, to become the very process of creation itself—unbound and limitless. Foundationally, collaboration is such an important element to each artist, but each in their own different ways. Each/Other not only presents the results of Watt and Luger’s past collaborative projects, but invites us to be a part of the artists’ creative processes, and through that experience, to become aware of the world outside of our immediate and limited vision—recognizing that we are part of something greater and larger than ourselves. It is an important notion, especially in these times.”
In September 2020, the artists, along with the DAM, distributed a video invitation that included a call for community participation and instructions for how individuals could contribute. The public, with no limit on geographic location, were invited to add to the work by physically sending what they created to the artists. Through this collaboration, it is the artists’ hope that participants discover something new about themselves, their neighbors, and the world around them, while leading to a greater sense of understanding between people. The artists combined the sourced submissions into a work that debuts in Each/Other.
Each/Other presents the work of Watt and Luger divided into two sections that explore the artists’ engagement with community, materials and the land. The new collaborative piece is located where the two artists’ works converge within the gallery. Works on view in Each/Other consist of materials including 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.
Following its presentation at the DAM, Each/Other will travel to additional venues beginning in fall 2021. An illustrated color catalog will accompany the exhibition and include essays by exhibition curator John P. Lukavic and Jami Powell (Osage Nation), Associate Curator of Native American Art at the Hood Museum, Dartmouth, with an in-depth edited interview with the artists by Namita Gupta Wiggers, Director of the Master of Art in Critical Craft Studies at Warren Wilson College. The catalog, designed by Chindo Nkenke-Smith, will tell a complex and nuanced story of Marie Watt and Cannupa Hanska Luger’s work while extending the themes explored in the exhibition.
