Raven Chacon: Storm Pattern

May 25, 2024 - March 2, 2025

_{Raven Chacon, Storm Pattern, 2021, ink on polyester and multi-channel sound installation, 80 x 136 ½ in. (203.2 x 346.7 cm). Albuquerque Museum, museum purchase, PC2022.15.1 Photograph © Albuquerque Museum}

Storm Pattern (2021) is a textile score and eight-channel hyper-directional sound installation by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and artist Raven Chacon (Diné), featuring isolated field recordings of flying drones captured at the 2016 Standing Rock Oceti Sakowin camp. The title of the work refers to a regional style in Navajo weaving in which zigzags and other elements radiate outward from the center. In this score, the patterns show the transmission and broadcast of surveillance and counter-surveillance footage beyond the mountains and waters of Oceti Sakowin. The recorded drones were controlled by police, DAPL security, and by the protesters themselves, including multidisciplinary artist Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota), who was born on the Standing Rock Reservation and is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold.

This work is part of the Albuquerque Museum permanent collection and is also presented as part of Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue, on view beginning September 2024. Chacon and Luger shared a conversation on the podcast that reflected on their time together traveling to Oceti Sakowin camp, the largest of several temporary camps on the northern edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and located on Luger’s ancestral homeland. Both artists supported the water protectors during their resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline.

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 National Gallery, Whitney Museum of American Art. The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music 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.

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.