Unsettled Scores: Conversation with Raven Chacon

This episode marks the second time featuring artist and friend Raven Chacon on Broken Boxes. The first time I interviewed Raven was in 2017, when I visited with him at the Institute of American Indian Arts where he was participating in a symposium on Indigenous performance titled, Decolonial Gestures. This time around, we met up with Raven at his home in Albuquerque, NM where recurring host and artist Cannupa Hanska Luger chatted with Raven for this episode. The conversation reflects on the arc of Ravens practice over the past decade, along with the various projects they have been able to work on together, including Sweet Land (2020), an award-winning, multi-perspectival and site-specific opera staged at the State Historical Park in downtown Los Angeles, for which Raven was composer and Cannupa co-director and costume designer. Raven and Cannupa also reflect on their time together traveling up to Oceti Sakowin camp in support of the water protectors during the resistance of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Raven provides context to his composition Storm Pattern, which was a response to being onsite at Standing Rock, and the artists speak to the long term impact of an Indigenous solidarity gathering of that magnitude. Raven speaks about being named the first Native American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize or Voiceless Mass, and shares the composition's intention and performance trajectory. To end the conversation, Raven shares insight around staying grounded while navigating the pressures of success, travel and touring as a practicing artist, and reminds us to find ways to slow down and do what matters to you first, creatively, wherever possible.

More about the artist:

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 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 whose work has spanned twenty-two years, Chacon has appeared on more than eighty releases on various national and international labels. His 2020 Manifest Destiny opera Sweet Land, co-composed with Du Yun, received critical acclaim from the Los Angeles 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. 

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) and the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022). 

His 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, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, the Albuquerque Museum, University of New Mexico Art Museum, and various private collections.


Music featured:

Sweet Land, Scene 1: Introduction (feat. Du Yun & Raven Chacon) · Jehnean Washington · Carmina Escobar · Micaela Tobin · Du Yun · Raven Chacon · Lewis Pesacov.  
Released on 2021-09-24 by The Industry Productions

BBP LIVE with artists Matika Wilbur, Andrea Carlson and Cannupa Hanska Luger

This very special episode of Broken Boxes Podcast marked our first ever conversation in front of a live studio audience. Recurring host Cannupa Hanska Luger was joined by Matika Wilbur and Andrea Carlon on October 28th 2023 as part of the University of Michigan Museum of Art’s  Memory & Monuments program. The artist’s drew from a hat of pre-considered topics to speak to and expand upon, including: Ancestral trade routes or sharing knowledge within a cultural continuum such as how culture, language and goods traveled precontact; Indigenous memory in relation to the American Myth; Recognition of Indigenous complexity; Indigenous futures including shared histories and futures; and Institutional critique or a generative airing of problematic power structures impact on Native people. Broken Boxes would like to thank UMMA staff and curators and Monument Lab for being present for this generative and complex conversation to take place. We would like to especially thank the students of the Native American Student Association at the University of Michigan, who welcomed Broken Boxes and the artists and helped make this live audience recording a wonderful experience.  

More about the artists:

Matika Wilbur (Swinomish and Tulalip) is one of the nation’s leading photographers, based in the Pacific Northwest. She earned her BFA from Brooks Institute of Photography where she double majored in Advertising and Digital Imaging. Her most recent endeavor, Project 562, has brought Matika to over 300 tribal nations dispersed throughout 40 U.S. states where she has taken thousands of portraits, and collected hundreds of contemporary narratives from the breadth of Indian Country all in the pursuit of one goal: To Change The Way We See Native America.

Andrea Carlson is a visual artist who maintains a studio practice in northern Minnesota. Carlson works primarily on paper, creating painted and drawn surfaces with many mediums. Her work addresses land and institutional spaces, decolonization narratives, and assimilation metaphors in film.  Her work has been acquired by institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Walker Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Denver Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada. Carlson was a recipient of a 2008 McKnight Fellow, a 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors award, a 2021 Chicago Artadia Award, and a 2022 United States Artists Fellowship. Carlson is a co-founder of the Center for Native Futures in Chicago.

Multidisciplinary artist Cannupa Hanska Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara), and Lakota. Through monumental installations and social collaborations that reflect a deep engagement and respect for materials, the environment, and community, Luger activates speculative fiction and communicates stories about 21st century Indigeneity. Luger is a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, recipient of the 2021 United States Artists Fellowship Award for Craft, and was named a Grist 50 Fixer for 2021, a list that includes emerging leaders in climate, sustainability, and equity from across the nation.

Music featured: Move, I’m Indigenous by  Uyarakq
BBP intro track by India Sky

Long Con: Sterlin Harjo & Cannupa Hanska Luger, Ep 6

Long Con is a series of conversations between Director Sterlin Harjo and Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger about life, art, film, history and everything in between - informally shared from the lens of two contemporary Native American artists and friends actively participating in the record of the 21st century.

This is the sixth episode of the Long Con series and was recorded live in person on Cannupa Hanska Luger and Ginger Dunnill’s back porch in Glorieta, NM in the Fall of 2023.

Sterlin Harjo is an award winning Seminole/Muscogee Creek filmmaker who has directed three feature films and a feature documentary all of which address the contemporary Native American lived experience. Harjo is a founding member of the five-member Native American comedy group, The 1491s. Sterlin’s latest project Reservation Dogs, is a television show created in collaboration with Taika Waititi, now available to watch on FX.

Cannupa Hanska Luger is a multidisciplinary artist creating monumental installations, sculpture and performance to communicate urgent stories of 21st Century Indigeneity. Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota. Luger’s bold visual storytelling presents new ways of seeing our collective humanity while foregrounding an Indigenous worldview.

Music featured: Snotty Nose Rez Kids - I Can't Remember My Name ft. Shanks Sioux Broken Boxes intro track by India Sky

We Are Here! - Conversation with Raven Halfmoon

After years of planning a conversation together for the podcast, artist and friend Raven Halfmoon and I sat down for a chat on a sunny summer afternoon above the clay education workspace at the Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts in Helena, Montana. We talked about the beginning of Raven’s path as an artist and how, although she works across mediums, her practice has most recently been centered in clay- and she has been going big! We speak to her conceptual approach of building large scale ceramics as a means to take up space for Indigenous women and how her recent works echo her community and cultural inspirations. We speak about navigating within the various art worlds including the ceramic and clay community, the Native art world and the larger contemporary art market. Raven shares how working with clay has taught her patience, understanding and an acknowledgement that failure, as much as success, is part of the clay journey. As we round out the conversation, Raven reflects on how as artists, we can’t just stay cooped up in our studios, we also have to go out, live our lives and be with our communities in order to be able to do our creative work in a sustainable way. Raven reminds us to find balance and practice great care with one of the most valuable resources we possess, time. 

Raven Halfmoon (Caddo Nation) is from Norman, Oklahoma. She attended the University of Arkansas where she earned a double Bachelors Degree in ceramics/painting and cultural anthropology. Her work has been featured in multiple exhibitions throughout the U.S. as well as internationally. Raven lives and works in Norman, OK. She is represented by Kouri+Corrao Gallery in Santa Fe, NM and Ross+Kramer Gallery in New York, NY.

BBP Intro track by India Sky
End Track: Kaytranada - What You Need (DJ Ron V Soul Remix)

Representation, Collaboration & Clay: Conversation with Sydnie & Haylie Jimenez

This summer I had the opportunity to sit down with twin sisters Sydnie and Haylie Jimenez as they rounded out a two year stint at the Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts. We sat down in The Bray’s library to recap on life and art just a couple weeks before they headed back to Chicago to continue the next chapter in their creative practice. The sisters shared about their upbringing and how growing up with mixed heritage in a mostly white community revealed that art can be a tool for nourishment and survival. They reflected on how in attending the School of The Art Institute of Chicago, they finally found their reflection in the BIPOC student body. And we learn how Sydnie began her clay practice, eventually landing on ceramics by utilizing SIAC’s large kilns. Haylie shares her practice of hand drawn animation, providing her the skills she utilizes today through large scale drawings and works on clay.  The artists share how they respectively work with the figure and storytelling, each drawing from identity and representation in an autobiographical nature. The sisters explain how they maintain a practice rooted in DIY culture, making clothes and other accessible pieces as HANDS, along with their more formal artworks. As they round out their journey at The Bray, the sisters reflect on their time in Montana, and we chat about the American clay world and how historically there has been a lack of diversity and representation. We also touch on the gap between the clay and craft markets and the fine art market. We chat about how the sisters inform each other creatively through collaboration while maintaining their own aesthetic and diverse practices - Sydnie produces large scale figurative work and Haylie carves on clay, complimenting her active drawing practice and tattoo trade. As we end our conversation the sisters remind us to take time and nourish our bodies and minds as we push to make space in the world for our communities to thrive creatively.

Sydnie Jimenez (b. Orlando, FL) received a BFA from SAIC (2020) focusing in ceramic sculpture and is a recipient of the Windgate- Lamar Fellowship (2020). Much of her work centers around the representation of black and brown youth in an American context. She illustrates in clay self-expression as a form of protest and self care to protect against a Eurocentric society founded on white supremacy and colonization. Jimenez is currently a long-term resident at Lillstreet Art Center in Chicago. 

Born in Orlando and raised in Chattanooga, Haylie later moved to Chicago to attend the School of The Art Institute of Chicago (BFA 2020). Finding Black and Brown Queer community in Chicago and her long lasting relationships with friends and family in Tennessee was and is a pivotal influence for her work which surrounds the importance of belonging, collective care, self expression, and moving through hardships to times of joy together within these communities. She is currently working out of Chicago developing her ceramic and drawing practice, preparing for various shows with her twin sister, Sydnie Jimenez.