For Zitkála-Šá Performance: Marisa Demarco

Experience Raven Chacon’s visual compositions from the For Zitkála-Ša (2018) series through live performance. Marisa Demarco will perform a one-of-a-kind, in-gallery concert. This ticketed performance will include the score For Carmina Escobar, as well as her own work.

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 Marisa Demarco

A lifelong musician and performer, Marisa Demarco surfaces and interrogates contemporary truths through worn sculpture, installation, music composition and journalism. Based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, she’s the founder of Gatas y Vatas festival for boundary-pushing performance and Milch de la Máquina, a women’s performance art crew. She’s also a leader with Death Convention Singers, the largest noise collective in the Southwest. Her work has appeared in galleries and museums, such as SITE Santa Fe, the National Hispanic Cultural Center, the UNM Art Museum, GRAFT Gallery, CFA Contemporary, and at the Carlsbad Museum as part of the Atomic Culture series. Demarco received her MFA in Experimental Art + Technology from the University of New Mexico. She’s worked as a journalist for over 20 years, and she’s an editor for the national nonprofit network States Newsroom.

About Carmina Escobar

Carmina Escobar is an experimental vocalist, improviser, performer, multimedia artist, composer, and educator from Mexico City, living and working in Los Angeles. She has extensively explored the capacities of her voice, developing a wide range of vocal techniques that she applies not only to her performance and creative practice but also to investigate radical ideas and concepts regarding the voice 

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 + Masa Rain 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