Raven Chacon
Site: Benton Park
Curator: Risa Puleo
As a composer, musician, and artist, Raven Chacon (Diné) brings attention to spaces in which music and art are performed to question the colonized ground upon which these assemblies take place. During the opening weekend of Counterpublic 2023, Chacon challenges the spatial organization of the State Streets neighborhood with an intervention into the organizing systems of music. For Music for 13 Paths, Chacon subdivided the twelve-note Western musical scale into thirteen divisions, hand-tuning thirteen chimes accordingly. Thirteen performers will move through the State Streets neighborhood, each holding a chime that sounds in response to the momentum of the performer’s cadence and call out to other performers stationed throughout the neighborhood. Culminating in Benton Park, the chimes are then suspended between two trees in an arc that mirrors the shape of the hill below and forms an anti-monument of St. Louis’s famed Gateway Arch, which celebrates expansion and the settlers who moved through the city to populate the West. Set against the historical context of Benton Park—specifically, its relationship to Manifest Destiny through the Missouri senator for whom it is named—Chacon’s performances offer an embodied and sonic way of finding solidarity and forming a nonvisual counter-coalition.
PROGRAM INFO
About the artist
Raven Chacon is a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. A recording artist over the span of 22 years, Chacon has appeared on over eighty releases on national and international labels. Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, Vancouver Art Gallery, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, SITE Santa Fe, The Kennedy Center, and more. His artworks are among the collections of the Whitney, the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, LACMA, and others.
ARTISTS LINKS
Instagram: @ravenchcn
Twitter: @raven_chacon
Website: spiderwebsinthesky.com
