Raven Chacon: A Worm’s Eye View From a Bird’s Beak

A 2023 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and the first Native American artist to receive the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2022, Raven Chacon works through sound, video, scores, performance and sculpture to address Indigenous sovereignty and environment justice.

At the center of SI’s first floor gallery is Chacon’s sound installation, Still Life No. 3 (2015). Through a series of speakers installed in a cascading arch, a woman tells the Navajo story of origins, comprises four worlds below and several others above.

But rather than conceiving of the worlds below as the past and the worlds above as the future, in the linear way that Western narratives might suggest, in Navajo cosmogony these multiple worlds still, or already, exist.

Parts of the creation myth repeat and overlap, blurring its progression and allowing multiple temporalities to coexist and affect one another.

Further inside the gallery, Report (2001/2015), a composition and score for an ensemble of firearms, punctuates silence through a cacophony of both power and resistance.

On the second floor, Chacon’s new video installation For Four (Caldera) (2024) features four women standing on a volcanic hollow in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico, reading the panorama of their natural surroundings and expressing what they see through song.

Field Recordings (1999) from the American Southwest magnify sounds of silence to produce noise that reveals the vibrational patterns of these locations.

A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak highlights the multidisciplinary depth of Chacon’s prolific practice of the past 25 years.

Between past, present and future, silence and noise, violence and resilience, Chacon’s work proposes new as well as ancient ways of relating through which alternative politics may be glimpsed.