CCAM Sound Art Series: Raven Chacon

Diné composer, musician, and artist Raven Chacon is the first Native American to win a Pulitzer Prize in music and is the recipient of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.

In celebration of its five-year anniversary, the CCAM Sound Art Series is thrilled to present Raven Chacon. On April 4 Chacon will speak about his practice with series curator Ross Wightman (CCAM Technical Manager; Lecturer, Yale College), then perform solo. A Q&A with the audience will follow.

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, REDCAT, Vancouver Art Gallery, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis 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.

A recording artist over the span of 22 years, Chacon has appeared on more than 80 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 (MCANA).

Since 2004, Chacon has mentored more than 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), and the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022). He was a 2023 MacArthur Fellow.

Chacon’s 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, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Getty Research Institute, and the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and various private collections.

Raven Chacon at Yale is a series of multidisciplinary engagements from April 3-8, initiated by the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) Sound Art Series and produced in partnership with Yale Schwarzman Center, the Yale Peabody Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale School of Music, the Music in Schools Initiative, and the Yale College Department of Music’s New Music Fund.