American Traditional

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to present American Traditional, an exhibition by New Mexico–based artist Cannupa Hanska Luger. The show—which inaugurates the gallery’s new space at 10 Greene Street in SoHo—will debut a group of new sculptures fabricated from salvaged materials and hand-built ceramics. The sculptures in American Traditional adopt a uniform palette of matte black. Created from an ironstone clay body with applications of sumi ink and direct flame, the all-encompassing monochrome strikes a chord that is mournful, even elegiac—and stands in marked contrast to the bright colors that typically define the artist’s work. In these pieces, precise arrangements of found objects—including Buffalo nickels, Pulaski axes, railroad spikes, and concertina wire—join ceramic replicas of a skinned pronghorn deer, a stack of bison skulls, and a severed Sharps Model 1874 sporting rifle. The works evoke specific episodes in the troubled history of Western expansion, simultaneously deconstructing and eulogizing the dream of dominion and transforming its material remnants into forms that are elegant and destabilizing. The show’s centerpiece is American Traditional (2026), a sculpture of a skinned bison. To emulate the layered musculature in this work—and for the related piece Incubus, also on view—the artist employs a unique embroidery technique that he developed specifically for this purpose, threading deadstock yarn in taut, fibrous rows. The life-size animal body, with its surreally bifurcated skull, sits atop an “American Traditional”–style dining table that the artist burned and stained with bone-black pigment. Evolving from his 2020 piece (No)stalgia, Luger’s new work is an ambiguous monument. It at once acknowledges the waste, brutality, and “bizarre and horrific history of colonialism,” while acting as a potent allegory for the instability of memory: the ways in which history is shaped and contorted by the present. “In American Traditional, the mutation of the skull, the transformation of the form, is a way to think about how memory is manipulated, how society strategically shapes our collective memory of the past. The parts of the story we don’t recall, or choose not to tell, also mutate. So when those histories reemerge, and pass through time, they become altered.” —Cannupa Hanska Luger On September 12, composer Raven Chacon will present a sound performance and artist activation within the exhibition. Born on the Standing Rock Reservation, North Dakota, Cannupa Hanska Luger (b. 1979) is of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, and European descent. An enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation, Luger works in media including installation, sculpture, video, and performance. Luger’s 2026 presentation at Garth Greenan Gallery coincides with the tenth anniversary of his Mirror Shield Project. Initiated in support for the Water Protectors at Oceti Sakowin camp near Standing Rock, North Dakota, the project took the form of an open call—via social media—inviting audiences to fabricate mirrored shields for use in frontline actions.

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