Unsettled Scores: Conversation with Raven Chacon

This episode marks the second time featuring artist and friend Raven Chacon on Broken Boxes. The first time I interviewed Raven was in 2017, when I visited with him at the Institute of American Indian Arts where he was participating in a symposium on Indigenous performance titled, Decolonial Gestures. This time around, we met up with Raven at his home in Albuquerque, NM where recurring host and artist Cannupa Hanska Luger chatted with Raven for this episode. The conversation reflects on the arc of Ravens practice over the past decade, along with the various projects they have been able to work on together, including Sweet Land (2020), an award-winning, multi-perspectival and site-specific opera staged at the State Historical Park in downtown Los Angeles, for which Raven was composer and Cannupa co-director and costume designer. Raven and Cannupa also reflect on their time together traveling up to Oceti Sakowin camp in support of the water protectors during the resistance of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Raven provides context to his composition Storm Pattern, which was a response to being onsite at Standing Rock, and the artists speak to the long term impact of an Indigenous solidarity gathering of that magnitude. Raven speaks about being named the first Native American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize or Voiceless Mass, and shares the composition's intention and performance trajectory. To end the conversation, Raven shares insight around staying grounded while navigating the pressures of success, travel and touring as a practicing artist, and reminds us to find ways to slow down and do what matters to you first, creatively, wherever possible.Raven Chacon is a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, REDCAT, Vancouver Art Gallery, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and The Kennedy Center. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009 to 2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the two-mile-long land art installation Repellent Fence. A recording artist whose work has spanned twenty-two years, Chacon has appeared on more than eighty releases on various national and international labels. His 2020 Manifest Destiny opera Sweet Land, co-composed with Du Yun, received critical acclaim from the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and The New Yorker, and was named 2021 Opera of the Year by the Music Critics Association of North America. Since 2004, he has mentored over 300 high school Native composers in the writing of new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). Chacon is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2022) and the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022). His solo artworks are in the collectIons of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, the Albuquerque Museum, University of New Mexico Art Museum, and various private collections.Music Featured: Sweet Land, Scene 1: Introduction (feat. Du Yun & Raven Chacon) · Jehnean Washington · Carmina Escobar · Micaela Tobin · Du Yun · Raven Chacon · Lewis Pesacov. Released on 2021-09-24 by The Industry Productions