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 with artist Cannupa Hanska Luger 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 profusion of flowers mostly in ruby red, bright white, and flamingo pink are gathered in a bronze-colored urn, set on a stone ledge against a dark background in this vertical still life painting. A band of flowers reaching from the lower left to the upper right draw the eye, and are made up of a pink rose at the bottom under a white rose, a white-and-red streaked tulip, and a crimson-red poppy near the upper right. Other flowers include a sprig of pale, nearly white lilac to the left, sapphire-blue morning glories, golden stalks of wheat, and green leaves interspersed throughout. The urn has a fluted, flaring foot. Upon closer inspection we find that the foot must belong to a much larger vessel, for a terracotta-colored person reclining next to a stylized fish emerges from behind the flowers at the upper left. An ivory-white butterfly with an orange spot on each wing alights on the tulip, whose petals are spread wide. A snail with a marmalade-orange shell with a thin, shiny, black spiral crawls along the ledge to our right, and on the stone ledge to our left, an earwig eats a honey-yellow caterpillar. The flowers and insects are brightly lit from our left, and the chocolate-brown background is swallowed in shadow. A partially legible inscription in the lower right reads, “Kouwe be h.”

virtual

Hands-On Activities:  Sketchbook Club: Philip van Kouwenbergh’s Flowers in a Vase

–
Registration Required