Artworks

Cannupa Hanska Luger,Mirror Shield Project, 2016

In conversation with Marie Watt’s exhibition, the gallery presents Mirror Shield Project (2016), a video by Cannupa Hanska Luger. Watt and Luger previously collaborated on the monumental sculpture Each/Other (2020 – 2021), an artist-guided community artwork in the form of a massive she-wolf created from bandanas, metal, leather, and other materials. The artists were also the subject of a major traveling two-person exhibition of the same name, organized by the Denver Art Museum. Luger’s video work, presented in collaboration with Garth Greenan Gallery, is drawn from his social activation of the same name. The Mirror Shield Project was initiated in support of the Water Protectors at Oceti Sakowin camp near Standing Rock, ND, in 2016. The project began out of urgency when Luger learned that the water of his father’s homelands, where he grew up on the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Reservation, was under threat through the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

The pipeline was originally planned to cross the Missouri River, north of Bismarck, North Dakota’s capital, but the city protested for fear that it would contaminate their water supply. The pipeline was rerouted downriver and just upstream from the Standing Rock Reservation.

In addition to the threat to the water, this new path of the DAPL was to desecrate several marked ancestral burial sites of both the Mandan and Lakota peoples. Over the course of nearly a year, an estimated 15,000 people from around the world traveled to the Water Protector camp areas just outside of Cannonball, ND, to stand in solidarity with the protection of the water and in support of the Indigenous-led actions in opposition to the DAPL. The mirrored shields were engaged and have since been shared globally as an act of inspiration for art as peaceful resistance.

By using art as a measure of action and creating an open-source format call for participation with an instructional video, How To Build Mirror Shields For Water Protectors, filmed and edited by Razelle Benally at the Institute of American Indian Arts during his Artist-in-Residence program in November 2016, Luger launched The Mirror Shield Project. This call to participate inspired people from across the nation to create and transport what has been estimated at over a thousand mirrored shields to the Oceti Sakowin Camp near Standing Rock, ND. Once onsite, these shields were available for use by the Water Protectors in frontline actions as they stood up against the police and the DAPL. The Mirror Shield Project has since been formatted and used in various resistance movements across the world.