OVERVIEW
REFLECT traces the evolving life of Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Mirror Shield Project, an open-source artwork initiated in 2016 in response to the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Indigenous-led resistance at Standing Rock. As the pipeline threatened the waters of his ancestral homelands, Luger circulated a video demonstrating how to make “mirror shields” from inexpensive materials. The tutorial functioned as a call to collective action, an invitation for the nation to stand in solidarity with the Water Protectors. More than a thousand mirror shields were created and transported to the Oceti Sakowin Camp.
The exhibition traces the mirror shields across a decade of circulation, adaptation, and reactivation as sculptural forms, tools of protection, educational resources, performance instruments, and catalysts for collective action. Photographs, videos, clothing, ephemera, and community-generated documentation reveal an artwork shaped by the many people who have made, carried, adapted, and activated it. Rather than presenting the Mirror Shield as a fixed object, the exhibition explores the ways its form and meaning have accumulated through use, movement, and collective authorship.
REFLECT functions as both a living retrospective of the Mirror Shield Project and a working toolshed, inviting visitors, artists, students, and community groups to make new shields and activate old ones. The exhibition brings the project’s history into the present, treating the archive as a resource to be carried forward, interpreted, and put into practice.
BACKGROUND
This exhibition is part of For Freedoms’ three-year Residency in Washington D.C., launched in September 2024 in partnership with the National Gallery of Art and the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at the George Washington University. Anchored by the theme of interdependence, the residency fosters interdisciplinary collaboration among artists, students, faculty, museum staff, encouraging innovative and accessible approaches to artistic research and public practice. Now entering its final year, the residency has evolved into a Civic Arts Lab, an active space for civic and cultural inquiry and artistic experimentation, and collective learning.
