Cannupa Hanska Luger, Midéegaadi, video stills courtesy of the artist.

A NEW MIDNIGHT MOMENT COMMISSION ON VIEW IN TIMES SQUARE

APRIL 1-30, 2025

Times Square Arts and For Freedoms are thrilled to announce Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Midéegaadi, a new Midnight Moment commission for the month of April 2025. 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. Midéegaadi will be on view every night from April 1 – 30. 

A series of video-works, Midéegaadi depicts Cannupa Hanska Luger wearing bison regalia made from repurposed materials and enacting the Northern Plains ancestral technology of calling bison back onto the land through dance and reverence. Presented as an invitation for humanity to envision the regeneration and return of the North American bison, Midéegaadi foregrounds Indigenous knowledge and culture as critical to humanity’s 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 / For Freedoms in 2021.  Luger’s first artbook, SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide (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 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.
www.cannupahanska.com

ABOUT FOR FREEDOMS
For Freedoms’ mission is to deepen civic engagement through the arts. We provide artists, institutions, and communities a decentralized space for connection, and the tools to support their creative capacities and resilience as cultural producers. Together, our network is building more robust civic dialogue, and inspiring a sense of belonging and responsibility for one another. Our vision is of a joyful, interconnected world where creativity is seen as integral to enhancing civic expression, listening, healing, and justice.
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.