Brendan Fernandes, Build Up the House II. Courtesy of Times Square Arts

Featuring Works by Artists Brendan Fernandes (March) and Cannupa Hanska Luger (April)

Times Square Arts, the largest public platform for contemporary performance and visual arts, is pleased to present their Midnight Moment Spring Season featuring digital works by multidisciplinary artists Brendan Fernandes (March) and Cannupa Hanska Luger (April).

Midnight Moment is the world’s largest, longest-running digital art exhibition, synchronized on over 92 electronic billboards throughout Times Square nightly from 11:57pm to midnight. The Spring 2025 program showcases video works that employ the body and movement to pay tribute to intersecting cultural histories and enact Indigenous technologies. 

Brendan Fernandes, Build Up the House II 
In Partnership with ART on THE MART
March 1-31, 2025 | Nightly 11:57- Midnight

In Build Up the House II, Fernandes weaves together silhouettes of dancers into digital tapestry inspired by African textiles linked to the artist’s roots in Nairobi. The hypnotic movement of the dance company also pays homage to house music, a genre rooted in queer and POC communities. Born in Nairobi, Fernandes immigrated to Canada, and later moved to New York, eventually ending up in Chicago, and the themes of race, migration, and movement in his art practice are a testament to his identity and lived experiences. A vibrant-hued, communal celebration through dance and assembly, Build Up the House II also mirrors the broader spirit of Times Square itself, a gathering place for New Yorkers and visitors from all over the world, and a spectacular choreography of people, lights, and moving images.

The original iteration of this work, Build Up the House, was commissioned by ART on THE MART, and presented in fall of 2024.

Cannupa Hanska Luger, Midéegaadi
In Partnership with For Freedoms
April 1-30, 2025 | Nightly 11:57- Midnight

Wearing multiple iterations of bison regalia crafted from repurposed materials, Cannupa Hanska Luger stars in Midéegaadi – a multi-channel presentation for April’s Midnight Moment. Enacting ancestral Indigenous technologies from the Northern Plains, Midéegaadi is a call to bring bison back onto the land through dance and reverence. Presented in Times Square at a monumental scale, the performance functions more broadly as an invitation to humanity to foreground Indigenous knowledge and culture as critical to our global survival. 

The videos and the regalia are part of the artist’s larger Future Ancestral Technologies project, an ongoing series of speculative fiction works in various formats that includes We Survive You, his billboard for LANDBACK.Art and For Freedoms in 2021.  Luger’s first artbook, SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide published by Aora Books will debut this year with an exhibition and performance in Summer 2025 at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, DC  in partnership with For Freedoms. 

ABOUT BRENDAN FERNANDES
Brendan Fernandes (b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya) is an internationally recognized Canadian artist  working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Currently based out of Chicago, Fernandes’s projects address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest and other forms of collective  movement. Always looking to create new spaces and new forms of agency, Fernandes’s projects take on hybrid forms: part Ballet, part queer dance party, part political protest…always rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity. Brendan is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2007) and a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship (2014). In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, and is the recipient of a prestigious 2017 Canada Council New Chapters grant. Brendan is also the recipient of the Platform Award (2024), the Artadia Award (2019), a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020) and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant (2019). His projects have shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial (New York); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); the Museum of Modern Art (New York); The Getty Museum (Los Angeles);  the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa); MAC (Montreal); among a great many others. He is  currently Associate Professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University and is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago and Susan Inglett Gallery in New York. Recent and upcoming projects include performances and solo presentations at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO; The MCA Denver, Denver, Colorado; The Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia, PA; and Prospect 6, New Orleans, LO. 

The artist is co-represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago and Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC.

ABOUT ART on THE MART
ART on THE MART, presented in partnership with Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE), is one of the world’s largest digital art platforms that transforms an architectural landmark into a permanent, larger-than-life canvas. A shining example of Chicago’s long-standing commitment to public art, ART on THE MART brings cutting-edge video mapping techniques to Chicago’s Riverwalk, displaying projections of contemporary art across the 2.5-acre façade of THE MART, the largest privately held commercial building in the United States, internationally recognized as a global innovator in culture, design, and technology.

ART on THE MART presents pioneering moving image work by renowned local, national, and international interdisciplinary artists. The program has commissioned work by celebrated names like Derrick Adams, Charles Atlas, Nick Cave, Barbara Kruger, and more, alongside projections by Chicago-based artists and local partner organizations, from the Joffrey Ballet, the Art Institute of Chicago and The Adler Planetarium to the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project and Chicago Public Schools. ART on THE MART amplifies the expressions of the broadest range of artists and partners to realize the power of public art and inspire positive community engagement along the river, throughout Chicago, and beyond. Founded in 2018, the program is a result of a 30-year commitment by THE MART owner Vornado Realty Trust, in close collaboration with the City of Chicago, with a shared goal to provide public access to innovative contemporary art to the thousands of visitors traversing the Chicago Riverwalk each day. 

Founded in 2018, the program is a result of a 30-year commitment by THE MART owner Vornado Realty Trust, in close collaboration with the City of Chicago, with a shared goal to provide public access to innovative contemporary art to the thousands of visitors traversing the Chicago Riverwalk each day.

ABOUT CANNUPA HANSKA LUGER
Cannupa Hanska Luger is a New Mexico based multidisciplinary artist creating monumental installations, sculpture and performance to communicate urgent stories of 21st Century Indigeneity. Incorporating ceramics, steel, fiber, repurposed materials, video, sound and performance, Luger activates speculative fiction, engages in land-based actions of repair and practices empathetic response through social collaboration. Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota. Luger combines critical cultural analysis with dedication and respect for the diverse materials, environments, and communities he engages. His bold visual storytelling presents new ways of seeing our collective humanity while foregrounding an Indigenous worldview. 

Luger is a 2025 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellow and a 2025 Ourworlds Immersive Visual Arts Award recipient. He received a 2024 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts and is a 2024 Monument Lab Fellow. He is a 2023 SOROS Arts Fellow, a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of a 2021 United States Artists Fellowship Award for Craft and was named a 2021 GRIST Change Maker. Luger is a 2020 Creative Capital Fellow, a 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, and the recipient of the Museum of Arts and Design’s 2018 inaugural Burke Prize. Luger’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including the Sharjah Biennial 16, United Arab Emirates, the 81st Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Kunsthal KAdE, Netherlands, Art Gallery of Alberta, Canada, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas, and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Georgia, among others. His work is in numerous public collections including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI, Nordamerika Native Museum, Zürich, Switzerland, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. Luger is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery in New York.

ABOUT FOR FREEDOMS
For Freedoms is an artist-led organization that centers art as a catalyst for creative civic engagement, discourse and direct action.  Founded in 2016 by a coalition of artists including Hank Willis Thomas, Eric Gottesman, Michelle Woo, and Wyatt Gallery, For Freedoms is dedicated to fostering an environment of listening, healing, and justice through a wide range of creative engagement. For Freedoms works closely with a variety of artists, organizations, institutions and brands to expand what participation in a democracy looks like and reshape conversations about politics. 

Learn more at www.forfreedoms.org. 

ABOUT TIMES SQUARE ARTS
Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance, collaborates with contemporary artists and cultural institutions to experiment and engage with one of the world’s most iconic urban places. Through the Square’s electronic billboards, public plazas, vacant areas and popular venues, and the Alliance’s own online landscape, Times Square Arts invites leading contemporary creators, such as Charles Gaines, Joan Jonas, Jeffrey Gibson, Pamela Council, Mel Chin and Kehinde Wiley, to help the public see Times Square in new ways. Times Square has always been a cultural district and place of risk, innovation and creativity, and the arts program ensures these qualities remain central to the district’s unique identity.