For Zitkála-Šá Performance: Autumn Chacon

Experience Raven Chacon’s visual compositions from the For Zitkála-Ša (2018) series through live performance. Autumn Chacon (Diné and Chicana) will perform a one-of-a-kind, in-gallery concert of the piece composed for her by Raven Chacon as part of his For Zitkála-Ša series, as well as her own work. As a conceptual, installation, and performance artist, Autumn Chacon often explores Indigenous futurisms where technology has a sacred relevance, highlighting her skills as a self-taught electronics engineer.  

Raven Chacon created For Zitkála-Ša, a series of lithographs of musical arrangements dedicated to contemporary American Indian, First Nations, and Mestiza women working in music performance, composition, and sound art. Chacon envisioned the scores as portraits of the women and how they navigate the twenty-first century. The title of the series refers to the Yankton Dakota composer and musician Zitkála-Šá, who lived from 1876 to 1938.  

About Autumn Chacon 

Autumn Chacon is a Diné/Chicana activist and conceptual artist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, whose work exhibits in the form of audio installation, electronic installation and performance art. Chacon was first exposed to activism and radical movements by her parents who were involved in both the American Indian and Chicano movements of the 1960s and ‘70s and their social and environmental justice values are present in the themes and causes of Autumn’s work. Autumn’s own activism work has been in pursuit of communication and media justice, environmental justice and economic justice. Much of her skill set including electronic engineering to community organizing has come from labor and workforce experience from working in public access TV to the securing of three FCC licenced Community Radio stations including one in the Navajo Nation bordertown of Gallup NM, before the age of 30. Chacon also has years of congressional lobbying to secure these rights for marginalized populations in between, and a stint in Norway and Switzerland meeting with the largest banks in the world in a successful effort to divest 3.8 billion dollars from the Dakota Access Pipeline. 

Autumn’s artist Curriculum Vitae reflects the same work but as an abstract, conceptual, installation, and performance artist. The majority of her pieces have been curated and exhibited among First Nations communities in Canada in cities such as Toronto, Ottawa, Thunder Bay, Brandon, and Calgary as well as her own region, traditional territory and broader United States including Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Flagstaff, Maine, Philadelphia Los Angeles and New York. Autumn is known for making broadcast installations and “interference” pieces meant to question federal regulations and our own relationship with regulated spaces. Her performance pieces are a peak into which Autumn draws most inspiration from among her own friends, family and fellow artists, collaborating and often writing pieces specifically for those individuals to perform. Meanwhile Autumn’s current activism work has to do with equitable and autonomous internet access and social network development towards Indigenous Technological Liberation..  

Many of Autumn’s traditional teachings as a Diné woman are reflected in art/activism praxis. Her communication tools are borne from our most basic teachings around language, speech and the act of speaking out loud; and the continuation of knowledge through technology is the involvement with many natural sciences and their ability to affect the world around us. With no lack of stories to be told Chacon strives to engage through new media technologies even if her stories are very old. 

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About the Exhibition  

Raven Chacon: Three Songs brings together three of Raven Chacon’s projects that pay tribute to Indigenous women through sound, video, and visual work. In the series For Zitkála-Šá (2018), Chacon created musical arrangements dedicated to different contemporary Indigenous, First Nations, or Mestiza women working in music performance, composition, or sound art. The video installation Three Songs (2021) features Indigenous women singing as they reoccupy sites of historic massacres, displacement, or relocation of tribal people. The final work, Silent Choir (2016-2017), is a field recording Chacon made while taking part in the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, which captures the silent protest of 600 water protectors facing police and security forces. When presented in unison, these works resound the suppressed histories and present-day stories of Native resistance in the face of systemic power. 

Raven Chacon is a Diné (Navajo) composer, performer, and installation artist born in Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation and based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Kennedy Center, and the Whitney Museum, among others. In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music. 

For Zitkála-Šá Performances:

Feb 24: Kona Mirabal

Apr 6: Autumn Chacon 

May 4: Laura Ortman 

Jun 7: Marisa DeMarco (performing For Carmina Escobar) 

Support for the For Zitkála-Šá Concert Series is provided by the Richard B. Siegel Foundation.