A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue - Raven Chacon & Laura Ortman Live Performance

Broken Boxes is pleased to present the audio from a very special site specific experimental music performance by award-winning artists and longtime collaborators Raven Chacon and Laura Ortman. 

This episode continues our series of live recordings from the exhibition program which accompanied Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue.

The performance was held on the occasion of the exhibition Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue at the Albuquerque Museum. Curated by Ginger Dunnill and Josie Lopez, the exhibition featured large-scale installation, sculpture, video, and a robust program celebrating the work and ideas of 23 artists who have contributed to the Broken Boxes podcast over the past 4 years.

Raven Chacon and Laura Ortman performed live September 19th 2024 at the Albuquerque Museum.

RAVEN CHACON, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, is known for his solo and collaborative works in contemporary art and music. His compositions range from highly experimental sound art to chamber music. His works have been featured at major museums and venues including the Whitney Biennial and documenta 14. Chacon has mentored over 300 Native American high school composers since 2004.

LAURA ORTMAN, a member of the White Mountain Apache tribe, is a musician and composer whose work spans albums, performances, and multimedia. As a soloist, Ortman performs on amplified violin, vocals, piano, electric guitar, and keyboard. She has performed at prominent venues like MoMA and the Whitney Museum and received the United States Artists Fellowship in 2022.

A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue - Artist Roundtable with Tanya Aguiñiga, Jeremy Dennis, Amaryllis R. Flowers and Guadalupe Maravilla

This episode kicks off a mini-series celebrating our six months of live programming which accompanied the 10 year anniversary exhibition, BROKEN BOXES: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue. 

On September 7, 2024 the opening program of the exhibition at the Albuquerque Museum included an artist roundtable featuring exhibiting artists Tanya Aguiñiga, Jeremy Dennis, Amaryllis R. Flowers and Guadalupe Maravilla in conversation with Broken Boxes hosts Ginger Dunnill and Cannupa Hanska Luger. 

The artists reflect on their respective practices as contemporary artists working to shift paradigms within the larger art world while upholding localized efforts of care. We hear about the work they each do and their values around community building, solidarity and the tools they use to enact survival as artists. Co-curator Josie Lopez opens the conversation with remarks and introductions. 

More about the artists featured in this conversation:

TANYA AGUIÑIGA, raised in Tijuana, creates work reflecting her binational identity using traditional and innovative materials. Focused directly on the US-Mexico border, she has activated spaces to confront contemporary issues of immigration. Founder of AMBOS, she collaborates on community-based projects and has received numerous awards. Her work is in major museum collections including LACMA and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. 

JEREMY DENNIS, a Shinnecock Indian Nation photographer, explores Indigenous identity and cultural assimilation. His work examines the unique experience of living on a sovereign Native American reservation and addresses contemporary Indigenous issues. He holds an MFA from Pennsylvania State University. 

AMARYLLIS R. FLOWERS, a queer, Puerto Rican-American artist based in upstate New York, examines hybridity, mythology, and sexuality through her vibrant, non-linear visual narratives. Her visual language uses symbol sets as a form of mapping to challenge colonial notions of how to navigate and describe our world. Her work has been showcased in significant national and international venues. She earned an MFA from Yale University and has received numerous prestigious awards.

GUADALUPE MARAVILLA, a Salvadoran artist, creates works that address migration and healing. His art serves as an impetus for healing through sound and is included in the collections of major institutions including MoMA and the Guggenheim. Maravilla has received

numerous fellowships and his work has been featured in significant international biennials.

More about the exhibition:

BROKEN BOXES: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue, curated by Ginger Dunnill and Josie Lopez, features large-scale installation, sculpture, video, and a robust programming line-up celebrating the work and ideas of 23 artists who have contributed to Dunnill's Broken Boxes podcast. The exhibition celebrates ten years of the podcast of the same name and amplifies the collective strength of contemporary artists. Focusing on interviews over the past four years, each of the featured artists engages their own cultural experience and elevates activism within diverse communities. 

Music featured by India Sky

Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue (Exhibition Sound Installation)

Over the next several months Broken Boxes will be releasing recordings from live programming which took place at the Albuquerque Museum in relation to the 10 year celebration exhibition, Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue, curated by Ginger Dunnill and Josie Lopez. The exhibition is currently on view until March 7 2025 and features the work of 23 artists who have been featured on the podcast over the past 4 years. The exhibition included a robust monthly program which featured artist talks, performance and film screenings. 

To start off this live series, Broken Boxes is sharing the sound installation compiled from interviews over the past 4 years with the featured artists. This audio plays throughout the exhibition on hyper-directional speakers and is also currently broadcasting from participating artist Autumn Chacon's illegal broadcast frequency from the museum out into the city of Albuquerque. 

Following this episode Broken Boxes will release the recordings from each live program that coincided with the exhibition. There is just a couple months left to see this special exhibition, so go catch it if you can!

To Belong: Conversation with Isabeau Waia'u Walker

In this episode we speak with Portland based multicultural Kānaka Maoli singer songwriter, Isabeau Waia'u Walker. Originally from Wailuku, Maui, Isabeau is a firm believer in the power of stories shared through song and aims to address the mind and heart in everything she creates. Her voice, her lyrics, her melodies and harmonies are both raw and refined, intimate yet relatable, memorable and haunting.

In this conversation Isabeau shares her relationship to place—how growing up on Maui surrounded by music through family, school and extended community impacted her own style of songwriting and shed light onto her originality and different way of approaching the craft. She shares about moving off island to Portland Oregon and her experiences of balancing being a teacher and a recording artist. We talk about the various themes in her two albums to date, her first full length album, Body, and her most recent record, Heavyweight, which was released in October of 2025. We end the chat with some solid tips for the creative toolkit and she shares with us the phrase “con placer” or “with pleasure”, a sentiment imparted to her by one of her musician friends and a reminder to always enjoy the process of creativity. Isabeau reminds us that success is subjective, and urges artists to always follow your own map of what success means for you.

Featured song: Wahine by Isabeau Waia'u Walker from the album Heavyweight

More about the latest album, Heavyweight:

Heavyweight is personal; the soundtrack for a heavy heart shored up with gratitude and tenderness. It is a gentle hand over yours, a head resting lightly on your shoulder, a mutual scream into the abyss. Isabeau writes to satisfy an internal tension. Her music is Bright Gloom, joy adjacent songs and stories from The Land of Broken and Demented Toys. Recorded by Ryan Oxford at The Center for Sound, Light, and Color in Portland, Oregon, Heavyweight owns up to flaws, admits to confusion and confesses failure but it is not a surrender. In contrast to her previous LP, Body, these songs are her individual bout with love, sacrifice and loss.  It is the wily smile and bruised cheekbone still standing in the next round; the bottoming out and a heartfelt, heartfull return. Heavyweight marks the first time Isabeau has recorded a project with a band, with her band of weird and talented brothers. Having the whole gang present throughout the process made room for real time collaboration. Her songs found their most mature form in her band community. Ryan and Isabeau have carved out a new groove in their artistic alliance and their friendship hosts a safe space to orchestrate songs as they mean to be. She is a lyric forward songwriter with stories reminding that while the worst has happened it didn’t take you out…if anything, it emboldened your heart, your love, your resolve. You are now sharper while more tender. Heavyweight is personal, but for all who have met grief. Heavyweight is hers, but also yours. These songs can hold your weight. “Take your heaviness / and give it back to the earth’s own weight / the mountains are heavy, the oceans are heavy.” - Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Poetry of Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus.

BROKEN BOXES LIVE - Cassils in conversation with Gayatri Gopinath at SITE SANTA FE

In honor of the opening weekend of Movements at SITE SANTA FE, exhibiting artist Cassils engages in a wide-ranging conversation with cultural critic Gayatri Gopinath on how their exhibition represents a departure from their earlier work, what it means to create trans* representation at this particularly fraught political moment, and the specificity of the New Mexico landscape in relation to the questions of time, space, historical memory, and embodiment that are central to their practice. This conversation was introduced by SITE SANTA FE curator Brandee Caoba and coordinated by Matthew Contos.

About the Presenters: 

Cassils is a transgender artist who makes their own body the material and protagonist of their performances. Cassils's art contemplates the history(s) of LGBTQI+ violence, representation, struggle, survival, empowerment and systems of care. For Cassils, performance is a form of social sculpture: drawing from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to forces of power and social expectations, Cassils's work excavates historical contexts to examine the present moment. Cassils exhibits internationally and is an Associate Professor of Sculpture and Integrated Practices in the Fine Arts Department at PRATT INSTITUTE.

Gayatri Gopinath is Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and the Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. She works at the intersection of transnational feminist and queer studies, postcolonial studies, and diaspora studies, and is the author of two monographs: Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Duke University Press, 2005), and Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2018). She has published widely on queer visual art and culture in anthologies and journals such as Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, GLQ, and Social Text, as well as in art publications such as PIX: A Journal of Contemporary Indian Photography, Tribe: Photography and New Media from the Arab World, and ArtReview Asia.

Movements exhibition at SITE SANTA FE:

Movements transposes the live choreography of Cassils’s debut contemporary dance piece, Human Measure (2022), reconceiving that performance as three new immersive installations that are distinct yet interconnected. Drawing upon the structure of a musical score, the exhibition weaves layered auditory experiences into a sweeping soundscape that spans the galleries’ architecture.

Movements is now on view at SITE SANTA FE through February 3, 2025

This program was recorded live on Saturday, November 16, 2024 at SITE SANTA FE in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Many thanks to the incredible teams at both SITE SANTA FE and Albuquerque Museum for your support and collaboration between spaces. 

Episode image graphic features the cyanotype artwork Human Measure by Cassils, 2021-ongoing, installed at SITE SANTA FE