Hands-On Activities

Bison Bead Workshop 

Bison Bead Project workshop for Colgate University’s Picker Art Gallery Artist in Residence; Cannupa Hanska Luger, 2022; photograph by Andrew Daddio, courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

Make clay beads by hand for artist Cannupa Hanska Luger's Bison Bead Project in this special all-ages workshop. Each bead represents one living bison in Luger’s Census (Bison Bead Project). Help the artist create an installation of 36 life-size bison sculptures made from enough beads to symbolize the more than 500,000 bison living in North America today. Through this shared act of making, we will reflect on resilience and our interconnectedness. 

This workshop is offered through a partnership with the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design and the artist-led organization For Freedoms.

Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota) is an award-winning, multidisciplinary artist and cultural innovator. Through large-scale installation, sculpture, performance, time-based media, and community engagement, Luger activates cultural continuity, ecological repair, and collective care. Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, he is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold. 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 in the United Arab Emirates. His work is held in major public collections such as the National Gallery, 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.

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A woman with pale skin and dressed in white sits on a couch gazing into the distance to our left as she raises one arm to stroke a black cat perched on her shoulder in this vertical portrait. Shown from the lap up, the woman’s dress has voluminous, puffed, elbow-length sleeves and a high collar, and her narrow waist is cinched with a white sash. Her dark brown hair is parted down the middle and tied back, and she has pale blue eyes and pink lips. She reaches up to the cat with her left hand, on our right, and her other hand, farther from us, rests flat in her lap. The black cat looks at us with greenish-yellow eyes as it almost disappears into the dark brown background above the white couch, which is decorated with a blue pattern. The artist signed the work with dark letters in the lower left corner: “Cecilia Beaux.”

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Registration Required