Raven Chacon brings home his quiet but powerful work of resistance

Feb. 23—Raven Chacon's art is coming home.

Three Songs, an exhibition of video, audio, and visual pieces that Chacon created for the 2022 Whitney Biennial in New York, will have a new home at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos for the next few months. Taos is the first place the entire exhibition has been installed since it made its debut at the Whitney.

Chacon, who lives in Albuquerque, is a Diné composer and artist who won the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass in 2022 followed by the MacArthur Fellowship in 2023.

The artist will be at the museum in Taos on Friday, February 23, for the opening of his exhibit, which consists of three elements: an audio recording made during the 2016 Dakota Access pipeline protests at Standing Rock reservation, a variety of scores dedicated to contemporary Indigenous women, and a seven-minute video that stands as both a memorial and a cry of resistance.

"All of these were made years back, but the Whitney was the first time they were all presented [together]," says Chacon. "The Zitkála Šá scores, there's 12 of them, and they had been exhibited in bits. But the first time they were presented all together was at the Whitney. And the third piece that was exhibited was a brand-new composition that was made for the Biennial."

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Raven Chacon: Three Songs exhibit runs from February 24 to July 7. Artist reception is 6:30-8:30 p.m. Friday, February 23. Performances are scheduled on February 24 (Kona Mirabal plus Masa Rain Mirabal), April 6 (Autumn Chacon), May 4 (Laura Ortman), and June 7 (Marisa DeMarco).

Harwood Museum of Art

238 Ledoux Street, Taos

575-758-9826; harwoodmuseum.org

Chacon created the last element — the seven- minute video that bears the same name as the exhibition — in 2021. Three women are the focal point, and they sing songs in their native languages at places sacred to their people that also have contemporary relevance.

The voices of the three women — Sage Bond (Diné), Jehnean Washington (Yuchi), and Mary Ann Emarthle (Seminole) — are accompanied only by snare drum, which Chacon says has a pointed message.

"It's using an instrument that was associated with the U.S. military and the cavalry," he says of Three Songs. "I like to think of it as reclaiming that instrument or the instrument taking on the burden of songs that maybe would not be appropriate for a traditional drum."

Bond, Chacon says, is singing about the Diné people being displaced from their homelands and eventually making it back to them — and she's singing at the site of a coal mine. Washington's song is about the Trail of Tears removal of the Cherokee and other tribes to Oklahoma and about the many people who drowned along the way. She's singing on the banks of the Arkansas River, and in the background, there's a hydroelectric dam.

Emarthle is singing about the removal of Seminoles and other tribes to Oklahoma, and she's singing at a site that's a monument to her people.

Three Songs and the Zitkála Šá scores also were exhibited at the Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art last year.

"It was powerful. A lot of people saw these videos," says Chacon, who earned a bachelor of arts degree from the University of New Mexico in 2001. "Sage and Janine are singers and have their own careers, so people were able to hear their music and see their performance in these videos. It was the second time I've been in the Whitney, and that's the biggest stage for art that one can have in the United States."

The oldest field recording in the exhibit, Silent Choir, comes from Chacon's visit to the protests at Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota in 2016. The protests lasted for months, and although Chacon was only there for nine days, he witnessed an epic confrontation between the people assembled to stop the pipeline and the security forces on the other side.

It was Thanksgiving weekend, he says, and about 12,000 people were protesting. Chacon brought audio recording equipment to document not only the sounds of the protest but also the sounds of people living in the encampment — and he wound up making art that weekend.

"After days and days of hearing people yelling — people were justifiably angry at the situation of this approaching pipeline — there was this action that happened just outside the encampment on the Backwater Bridge," he says. "The elder women of the camp walked up and confronted the police and security and just stared. They just stood in silence and a large group of people followed behind and just followed their lead of not saying anything. This audio recording is this presence you can feel of hundreds of people just being absolutely quiet."

The final piece of the exhibit, the visual scores, are part of a project that Chacon had been working on for years. He wanted to commemorate the life of Zitkála-Šá (1876-1938), a poet and composer who was one of the most influential Native American activists of the 20th century.

At first, he says, he thought it would become an operetta or an oratorio, but then had an even better idea: He would pay tribute to Zitkála-Šá by acknowledging today's Indigenous women who are engaged in the arts, activism, education, or other integral fields.

"They are made up of my own drawings and notations and mappings of how I think one would go about making a kind of music that relays the ideas of what I think each of these people I wrote for makes," he says. "I think not only is it intended to replicate the sound of what they do but also in a way to tell a story, at least abstractly, through the way one learns and navigates the score. The instructions for all of them are accompanying the scores in the exhibition, and they describe the language and lexicon of each score. But they're notations that I made up, and sometimes they're used in conjunction with standard music notation."

Chacon, who teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts, wrote a score for his sister, Autumn Chacon, and a score for Joy Harjo, the 23rd United States Poet Laureate. He wrote another score for Laura Ortman, a violinist and one of his peers in the noise rock (experimental music) community. Autumn Chacon and Ortman will perform their scores live at the Harwood on April 6 and May 4, respectively.

But Chacon notes that the scores can be played in many different ways.

"A lot of these scores function differently," he says. "Normally, you would have a beginning and you would proceed through each bar until you got to the end. A lot of these contain paths; one might be able to choose a different way of navigating through the composition, so there's a lot of agency for the performer in how they might change the outcome of the piece."