The Peabody Essex Museum puts creatives in conversation
Viewers are invited to attend a virtual event, “With Each Other artists Cannupa Hanska Luger + Marie Watt.” The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem is hosting a dialog between Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, the establishment’s Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo executive director and CEO, and Indigenous contemporary artists Marie Watt and Cannupa Hanska Luger. Held on Jan. 26 at noon, the event comes ahead of an exhibit that will be open from Jan. 29 through May 8. The museum presented a statement on what the actual show will be like:
“Works on view in Each/Other will consist of materials including carved wood, ceramic and fabric sculpture, photography, installation works with concertina and oil drums, video-based interpretive elements and documentation pieces to show past performance works by the artists. Together, Watt and Luger emphasize creativity as a boundless process, and a catalyst for connection and building greater empathy and understanding between individuals, neighbors, communities, and the world around us.”
For more information about the artists, see below:
Marie Watt is an American artist. She is a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians and also has German-Scot ancestry. Her interdisciplinary work draws from history, biography, Iroquois proto-feminism, and Indigenous teachings; in it, she explores the intersection of history, community, and storytelling. Through collaborative actions she instigates multigenerational and cross-disciplinary conversations that might create a lens for understanding connectedness to place, one another and the universe.
Cannupa Hanksa 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. Many of Luger’s artworks will be on view in the forthcoming Each/Other: Marie Watt and Cannupa Hanska Luger, an exhibition organized by the Denver Art Museum that opens January 29 at PEM. Included in the exhibition is Luger’s Every One (2018). Hundreds of people across the United States and Canada contributed to this collaborative artwork which is composed of over 4,000 individual handmade clay beads — each bead representing an Indigenous person who has been lost in the missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, queer, and trans epidemic.
A link to the event is here.
Shira Laucharoen is a reporter based in Boston. She currently serves as the assistant director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. In the past she has written for Sampan newspaper, The Somerville Times, Scout Magazine, Boston Magazine, and WBUR.