Research + Practice: Cannupa Hanska Luger & Eric Gottesman
About this Event
Biography • Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota) is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and cultural innovator whose expansive creative and philosophical practice introduces new methodologies, ideas, and speculative technologies that reflect Indigenous innovation and shift collective thinking. Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, he is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold.
Through large-scale installation, sculpture, performance, time-based media, and community engagement, Luger activates cultural continuity, ecological repair, and collective care. His bold visual storytelling builds frameworks for reimagining systems, grounding artistic practice in Indigenous worldviews, critical inquiry, and material experimentation.
Luger’s work has been presented nationally and internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Sharjah Biennial. His work is held in major public collections such as the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. He is a 2025 National Geographic Wayfinder Award recipient and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, among numerous honors.
Biography • Eric Gottesman (b. 1976 Nashua, New Hampshire) teaches, organizes, writes, and makes artworks with other people. His work addresses nationalism, migration, structural violence, history and intimate relations. His projects question accepted notions of power and, by engaging communities in critical self-reflection and creative expression, propose models for repair.
Gottesman’s work is always collaborative; he has never made an artwork alone. Gottesman has presented his collaborative art projects at health conferences, universities, in government buildings, on the televised opening of the NFL season, on indigenous reserves, in post-war rubble, and at museums like MoMA PS1, MFA Boston, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Addis Ababa City Hall, the Children's Museum of Art in New York, the Cornell Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Center of Photography, the Addison Gallery of American Art and others. Sudden Flowers, his decade-long collaboration with young people in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, toured that country in a series of street installations, and was published as a collective monograph.
Gottesman is a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow (2020), a recipient of an ICP Infinity Award (2017), a Creative Capital Artist (2015), a Fulbright Fellow (2012), a Lightwork resident artist (2011), an Artadia awardee (2009), a co-founder of civic art collective For Freedoms, and a co-creator of the book For Freedoms: Where Do We Go From Here? (2024). His co-translation of Ethiopian writer Baalu Girma’s banned novel Oromaye was published in Hayden’s Ferry Review, only the second published English language translation of Amharic literature.
This talk is a part of the Studio Arts and Design Research + Practice lecture and conversation series, occurring on Wednesday nights. The Research + Practice series invites acclaimed artists, writers, critics and scholars to the Corcoran School throughout the year. The talks are free to the public, providing both the community and our students access to thought-provoking examples of contemporary research and practice and a chance to engage with leading cultural figures. Speakers are nominated and selected by the Studio Arts and Design programs, hosted by students and faculty at the historic Beaux Arts Flagg Building in Washington, D.C. Dates for the Research + Practice series are listed below.
We look forward to seeing you soon!
* All events will be Wednesday nights, 6:30pm-8:00pm.*
9/23/2026: Jomo Tariku - Hammer auditorium
9/30/2026: Beverly Price - Hammer auditorium
10/21/2026: Ilona Gaynor - Hemicycle
10/28/2026: Cannupa Hanska Luger + Eric Gottesman - Atrium + Bridge
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Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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