Tamarind Talks: Raven Chacon

Raven Chacon, a 2023 MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient and University of New Mexico alum, will speak publicly on his 2024-2025 Frederick Hammersley Artist Residency at Tamarind Institute, and his upcoming city-wide performance in Albuquerque.

Devised by Albuquerque-based composer Raven Chacon, Tiguex is a large-scale musical composition consisting of twenty overlapping movements performed over the span of a day, across the city. Tiguex, printed and published by Tamarind Institute, exists as an edition of lithograph prints of the score, which is in the form of a map of the city currently known as Albuquerque. The score shows the geographic locations of where the movements will take place throughout the city while also functioning as a temporal map, referencing the diverse landscapes of the central Rio Grande valley: the Sandia mountains, the volcanoes of the West Mesa, railroads, waterways, conquistador trails, Route 66, and Sandia and Isleta Pueblos.

“This ambitious piece harks back to the more modest days when Chacon and his cohorts listened to KUNM and performed under bridges, on rooftops, in the streets, and studios,” writes author and activist Lucy R. Lippard. “Commemorating the city’s history and so-called prehistory, the artist is creating a voluminous score/map/print at Tamarind Workshop based on in-depth research including perusal of old and obscure maps from earliest colonization attempts to Russian cold war charts. Printmaking is the perfect vehicle with which to record this momentous event as it too is generous and populist in the best, pre-Trumpian, sense. Free of the market and accessible to a broad local audience, the print suggests the city’s chaotic identity—traffic, wind, drying river—and the collision of all the urban craziness rarely found in concerts.”

Raven Chacon is a 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, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and Swiss Institute Contemporary Art New York. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009-2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the 2-mile long land art installation Repellent Fence.

A recording artist over the span of 24 years, Chacon has appeared on more than eighty releases on various national and international labels. In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass. His 2020 Manifest Destiny opera Sweet Land, co-composed with Du Yun, received critical acclaim from The LA 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), the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022), and is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow.

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 University of New Mexico Art Museum, and various private collections.

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