ARCHIVE EPISODE FROM 4/21/2025

A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue - Long Con Live with Sterlin Harjo and Cannupa Hanska Luger

This special program took place on November 2, 2024 and featured a screening of Sterlin Harjo's documentary Love & Fury, a film where Sterlin follows Native artists for a year as they navigated their careers in the US and abroad. Love & Fury explores the immense complexities each artist faces in regards to their own identity as Native artists, as well as pushing Native art further into a post-colonial world.

Following the film screening, the program included a live Long Con series episode with Sterlin Harjo and artist Cannupa Hanska Luger. This is the first time Long Con was presented in front of a live audience, and the conversation was anchored in themes drawn from the film, Love & Fury, and in the spirit of Long Con, Sterlin and Cannupa also shared vulnerable and hilarious reflections of their life as two friends sharing what it feels like to be contemporary Native American artists actively participating in the record of the 21st century.

This episode continues our series of live recordings from the exhibition program which accompanied Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue at the Albuquerque Museum.

Sterlin Harjo is an award winning Seminole/Muscogee Creek filmmaker who has directed three feature films and a feature documentary all of which address the contemporary Native American lived experience. Harjo is a founding member of the five-member Native American comedy group, The 1491s. Sterlin’s latest project Reservation Dogs, is a television show created in collaboration with Taika Waititi, now available to watch on Hulu.

Cannupa Hanska Luger is an award winning multidisciplinary artist who creates monumental and situational installations and durational performance and often initiates community participation and social collaboration. Raised on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, he is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota.

Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue, curated by Ginger Dunnill and Josie Lopez, features large-scale installation, sculpture, video, and a robust programming line-up celebrating the work and ideas of 23 artists who have contributed to Dunnill's Broken Boxes podcast. The exhibition celebrates ten years of the podcast of the same name and amplifies the collective strength of contemporary artists.

https://www.cabq.gov/artsculture/albuquerque-museum/exhibitions-1/broken-boxes-a-decade-of-art-action-and-dialogue

ARCHIVE EPISODE FROM 11/23/2024

Long Con is a series of conversations between Director Sterlin Harjo and Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger about life, art, film, history and everything in between - informally shared from the lens of two contemporary Native American artists and friends actively participating in the record of the 21st century. This is the seventh episode of this series, recorded live in person in Tulsa, Oklahoma in October 2024.

For this episode of the Long Con, Cannupa visits Tulsa, Oklahoma for 48 hours for an artist talk and the two artists take advantage of the opportunity to have a recording session for the Long Con series. They begin the convo on a car drive out to Sterlin’s property. In the true nature of this series we dip into UFO’s, Deadman’s thumbprints, Tarantula’s and coffee shop etiquette, among other random stories.
They discuss the nuance of the city of Tulsa, the current state of Native Art, the economics and precarious nature of popularity and how that may impact a larger community when culture is trending in a market. They touch on land acknowledgements, question and answer: who decides what Native Art is and how that demographic has shifted through the generations. There’s mention of Oscar Howe and his infamous letter to the Philbrook Museum, the legendary artist Bob Houzous and others who have bent an arc between generations of artists pushing boundaries for decades. We arrive at Sterlin’s house and the second segment of the conversation features tales from the real ‘Uncle Brownie’, Sterlin’s dad. Brownie shares stories about his upbringing in Sasakwa, Oklahoma, his experiences as a self taught karate instructor and about the character ‘Uncle Brownie, from Reservation Dogs. Rounding out this long con(versation), Brownie imparts some advice to us in the younger generations to remember to be accountable— that there is an obligation to past and future generations to set a good example. As the artists head back into the city, we get a wave from Sterlin’s mom.

About the artists:

Sterlin Harjo is an award winning Seminole/Muscogee Creek filmmaker who has directed three feature films and a feature documentary all of which address the contemporary Native American lived experience. Sterlin is a founding member of the five-member Native American comedy group, The 1491s. Sterlin’s latest project Reservation Dogs, is a television show created in collaboration with Taika Waititi, now available to watch on Hulu.

Cannupa Hanska Luger is a multidisciplinary artist who creates monumental and situational installations and durational performance and often initiates community participation and social collaboration. Raised on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, he is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota.

ARCHIVE EPISODE FROM 11/9/2023

Long Con is a series of conversations between Director Sterlin Harjo and Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger about life, art, film, history and everything in between - informally shared from the lens of two contemporary Native American artists and friends actively participating in the record of the 21st century.

This is the sixth episode of the Long Con series and was recorded live in person on Cannupa Hanska Luger and Ginger Dunnill’s back porch in Glorieta, NM in the Fall of 2023.

Sterlin Harjo is an award winning Seminole/Muscogee Creek filmmaker who has directed three feature films and a feature documentary all of which address the contemporary Native American lived experience. Harjo is a founding member of the five-member Native American comedy group, The 1491s. Sterlin’s latest project Reservation Dogs, is a television show created in collaboration with Taika Waititi, now available to watch on Hulu.

Cannupa Hanska Luger is a multidisciplinary artist who creates monumental and situational installations and durational performance and often initiates community participation and social collaboration. Raised on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, he is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota descent.