Raven Chacon

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, performer and installation artist Raven Chacon creates evocative and powerful multidisciplinary works that challenge, question and reframe America’s colonial legacy from an Indigenous perspective. Born in Fort Defiance on the Navajo Nation, his experimental practice invites audiences to question the narratives that shape our world. This Phil Lind Initiative event will feature performances of Chacon’s music alongside a conversation with the artist that reflects on the on-going legacies of colonialism and how they challenge and unsettle notions of “American” identity. 

Hailed in The New York Times for poignant works with “conceptual grounding in the politics of history and place” and “resistance to the long-continuing colonialist desecration of Indigenous land,” Chacon is known for his use of nontraditional instruments and notation. Often incorporating sounds from rifles, foghorns, and axes alongside orchestral instruments, his accompanying graphic scores are both visual commentaries and a way to make his music accessible to performers outside the confines of the western notated music.  

His 2022 Pulitzer-winning composition, Voiceless Mass, explores the silenced voices of Indigenous communities, embodying the tension between spirituality and cultural erasure. He is the recipient of the MacArthur “genius” Fellowship and has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Whitney Biennial, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, The Kennedy Center, and more.  

This event will be moderated by Jarrett Martineau.

Presented by UBC’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs in partnership with Chan Centre for the Performing Arts.