September 21 – December 1, 2024
32 Lisgar St and Park
Three Songs (2021) is a three-channel video installation that explores a history of Native resistance and questions the myth of an uninhabited American West. In the video, Indigenous women appear singing in their languages and playing instruments while they occupy historical sites of massacres, violence, and the forced displacement of tribal peoples. The work features Sage Bond (Diné), Jehnean Washington (Yuchi) and Mary Ann Emarthle (Seminole) who sung in their native tongue a history of resistance on the Trail of Tears, the Navajo Long Walk, and the forced expulsion of the Seminole.
The videos are accompanied by For Zitkála–Šá (2017–20), a series of graphic scores dedicated to First Nations, Native American, and Mestiza composers or sound artists: Ange Loft, Autumn Chacon, Barbara Croall, Candice Hopkins, Carmina Escobar, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Heidi Senungetuk, Jacqueline Wilson, Joy Harjo, Laura Ortman, Olivia Shortt, and Suzanne Kite. This edition of For Zitkála-Šá was commissioned by MOCA Tucson.
Bio
Artist Bio
Raven Chacon
Raven Chacon (he/him) 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 2009-2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the 2-mile long land art installation Repellent Fence.
A recording artist over the span of 22 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 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.
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 University of New Mexico Art Museum, and various private collections.
Exhibition Site
32 Lisgar St and Park
32 Lisgar St
Toronto ON
M6J 0C7