Raven Chacon, Pulitzer Prize-winning Diné composer and performer, will present his Three Songs at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico, February 24 through July 7. He honors Indigenous women with sound, video and visuals. The three works presented, “resound suppressed histories and present-day stories of Native resistance in the face of systemic power,” according to the museum.
For Carmina Escobar (For Zitkála-Šá), 2017-2020. Credit: Raven Chacon and Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts.
Its curator of exhibitions and collections, Nicole Dial-Kay, who has known Chacon’s work for more than a decade, notes that the Albuquerque-based artist is a perfect fit for the Harwood’s dedication to featuring New Mexico artists from different cultures. Presenting art of the highest level is an inspiration for artists of the region and the Taos Pueblo.
She explains that Silent Choir is a sound installation of field recordings Chacon made during the No Dakota Access Pipeline resistance near the Standing Rock Reservation in 2016. Native women led a silent protest against police and security forces. “The protesters stared silently at the police,” Dial-Kay says. “The installation is a small bench for one or two people placed beneath a speaker emitting the sounds of hundreds of water protectors shuffling and attempting to be silent.”
Three Songs, 2021, sung by Sage Bond (Diné), Jehnean Washington (Yuchi) and Mary Ann Emarthle (Seminole). Courtesy Raven Chacon.For Zitkála-Šá honors the Yankton Dakota musician, writer and political activist who received national recognition for her writings on Indigenous rights. Chacon composed 13 movements dedicating each to contemporary Indigenous, First Nations or Mestiz women working in music performance, composition or sound art. Lithographs of the conceptual musical score accompanied by instructions will be shown in the installation.
For Three Songs, Chacon invited Native women to sing at a site that had witnessed a battle, massacre, displacement or relocation of their tribe. In the video installation, Sage Bond (Diné), Jehnean Washington (Yuchi) and Mary Ann Emarthle (Seminole) sing in their own language about the land’s history, present and future while playing a snare drum.
Three Songs, 2021, sung by Sage Bond (Diné), Jehnean Washington (Yuchi) and Mary Ann Emarthle (Seminole). Courtesy Raven Chacon.In addition to celebrating Indigenous women, Chacon explores sound and silence.
He says, “Music for me is things lining up with other things…beauty lining up with other beauty. I don’t mean some general sense of beauty. I just mean my own personal ideas of beauty—a bird flying through sky at the same time it starts raining, or a gunshot happening at the same time as me dropping my iced coffee—things lining up with other things in a way that gets me outside of the reality of the universe that I’m experiencing at the time.”
When asked about the role of silence in his work, he replied, “I have some works that are amplified silence. I wanted to consider the nonverbal, nonvisual alignments two people could have—and how these could be ways to organize not only musicians, but become shared experiences for groups of listeners. Other works intend to magnify the land, to hear beyond our capabilities, not in a deep listening sense, but at the expense of fidelity, to hear the land as no human should comprehend.”
Silent Choir, 2017-2022. Credit: Raven Chacon.
The exhibition will feature several performances during its run: Kona Sunrise + Masa Rain Mirabal, February 24; Autumn Chacon, April 6; Laura Ortman, May 4; and Marisa DeMarco, June 7.
February 24-July 7, 2024
Raven Chacon: Three Songs
Harwood Museum of Art 238 Ledoux Street, Taos, NM 87571 (575) 758-9826, www.harwoodmuseum.org
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