Raven Chacon : A Worm?s Eye View from a Bird?s Beak

The first ever monograph on the groundbreaking work of artist and composer Raven Chacon.

A career-spanning catalogue featuring excerpts from Raven Chacon’s scores, musical prompts, and drawings interspersed with full-color documentation and descriptive texts of installations, sculptures, and performances.

Raven Chacon is a composer and artist creating musical experiences that explore relationships among land, space, and people. In an experimental practice that cuts across the boundaries of visual art, performance, and music, Chacon breaks open musical traditions and activates spaces of performance where the histories of the lands the United States has encroached upon can be contemplated, questioned, and reimagined. In 2022, Raven Chacon became the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, and was awarded a prestigious MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2023.

The publication features newly commissioned texts including three long-form essays by Aruna D'Souza, Anthony Huberman, and Dylan Robinson/Patrick Nickleson; experimental short-form writing by Raven Chacon, Lou Cornum, Ingir Bål Nango, Marja Bål Nango, Eric-Paul Riege, Ánde Somby, and Sigbjørn Skåden; an introduction by Katya García-Antón and Stefanie Hessler; and a conclusion by Candice Hopkins.

Co-published by Swiss Institute and Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum

Alison Coplan is Chief Curator of Swiss Institute, New York where she has organized over 50 exhibitions and projects of newly commissioned work with artists such as Alfatih, Latifa Echakhch, Karen Lamassonne, Jac Leirner, Shuang Li, Raúl de Nieves, Sandra Mujinga, Vivian Suter, Jenna Sutela, TELFAR and Shen Xin. She is the editor of publications on the work of artists Anna-Sophie Berger, Irena Haiduk, Hans Haacke, Jill Mullead, Walter Pfeiffer, Cally Spooner and Jan Vorisek.

Katya García-Antón is Director and chief curator, Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum.

Stefanie Hessler is Director of Swiss Institute, New York. Author of Prospecting Ocean (MIT Press and TBA21–Academy, 2019) and editor of over a dozen volumes including Frida Orupabo (Sternberg Press, 2022), Sex Ecologies (MIT Press, Kunsthall Trondheim and Seed Box, 2022), Tidalectics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science (MIT Press, 2018) and Life Itself (Moderna Museet and Koenig Books, 2016).