A few weeks later, on a clear, cold January afternoon, I met the artist at his home in the snowy hills above Santa Fe. Luger was wearing jeans, a hooded sweatshirt and a hat. While playing with his dogs outside, we talked about several ceramic pieces he had been working on: a head with a sword in its mouth; an oversized bison skull; a stoic native face mask. “It’s not art; they are what is left of the art,’ he told me. Luger’s art is process-oriented, not object-oriented, and what drives him is not what he makes, but the thrill of making it. “All these things are just by-products of something incredibly special. Ceramic chips and paint fade, but the creation is perfect.”
Luger calls clay a “generous” material. He recently made 72 ceramic balls, each cast from one of several moulds, then fired in his kiln and painted with motifs that reshaped them as purely aesthetic objects. One design featured cobalt-colored flowers reminiscent of Russian teacups, while others took inspiration from Crayola crayons and military camouflage patterns. Another was treated with gold leaf and porcelain. The installation, called “Rounds”, grew out of Luger’s continued fascination with symbols of colonial violence and his interest in representing them as aesthetic trophies – like an indigenous anthropologist of white settler culture, he detaches the object from its function and finds a strange beauty.
When Luger was 4, his parents divorced and the reservation eventually became a place he visited on his own. He and his four siblings moved in with their mother, the artist Kathy Whitman-Elk Woman, who moved with them to the Black Hills for a while before settling in Santa Fe to get a better life. (“There is no economy for Native art in North Dakota,” Luger said.) It was a transient childhood, with periods in New Mexico and Arizona, but always tied to the Santa Fe Indian Market, where his mother sold her beadwork, paintings, and sculptures on a stand every August.
Santa Fe has been the center of the Native art world since September 4, 1922, when Museum of New Mexico director Edgar Lee Hewett inaugurated what was then the Southwest Indian Fair and Industrial Arts and Crafts Exhibition. In a welcome speech, Hewett, a white archaeologist and anthropologist from Illinois, expressed hope that the market would help preserve what he sometimes called the “ancestral purity” of Native arts and crafts. By appointing himself as the arbiter of native authenticity, Hewett encouraged the Pueblo Indians to abandon all pottery traditions that arose from contact with the Spaniards—believing that they had compromised the “racial purity” of the art—while continuing his own corrupting influence. A draw in the market’s first year was a style of black-on-black pottery developed by people of the San Ildefonso Pueblo for sale solely to white buyers; Hewitt also offered free entry to Native Americans who came dressed in traditional clothing.
A century later, Santa Fe’s more than 200 art galleries, mostly specializing in Native art, mostly what Luger calls “Santa Fe romance,” sell an aesthetic descendant of Hewett’s ideal: silver and turquoise jewelry, Zuni dolls, dusty Georgia O’Keeffe sunsets. Hewett’s creation has turned into the Santa Fe Indian Market, where over an extended weekend each summer, 1,000 artists representing 160 different tribes, nations, and villages display and sell their work to more than 100,000 visitors.
While marketing Luger, Elk Woman rightly felt that her son hated the attributes. Being successful there meant endless negotiation, networking and the kind of selling that bordered on theatricality. When white clients made abusive offers at Elk Woman’s work, told lame jokes, or made unreasonable demands on her time, she had no choice but to put them in a good mood. She was a single mother with five children to care for, and without any source of income besides her art, she relied on the Indian market. However, playing that game well can be stifling, and she’s sure her son saw that. “I think it left a bad taste in his mouth,” she told me. Luger said that observing his mother on the fringes of that economy also sharpened his instincts to recognize who wanted to support native artists and who wanted to rob them.
