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

Raven Chacon is a composer, performer, and installation artist born at Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. A recording artist over the span of 22 years, Chacon has appeared on over eighty releases on national and international labels. He has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Whitney Biennial, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, The Kennedy Center, and more. As an educator, Chacon is the senior composer mentor for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project (NACAP). In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass, and in 2023 was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship.

Alison Coplan is Chief Curator at Swiss Institute, where she organizes exhibitions and programs, and oversees publications. At SI, she has curated projects with artists including Raven Chacon, Shen Xin, Alia Farid, and Hans Haacke, among many others. She has additionally organized over 150 public programs with artists and thinkers. In 2017, she served as the cross-institutional festival organizer for the 13-venue, New York City iteration of Ugo Rondinone: I ︎<3 John Giorno, and in 2019, she worked together with the Getty Research Institute to present Harald Szeeman: Grandfather: A Pioneer Like Us at SI. She holds an MA in Art History: Critical and Curatorial Studies from Columbia University.

Re’al Christian is a writer, editor, and art historian based in Queens, NY. Her work explores issues related to identity, diasporas, ecology, media, and materiality. Her essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in BOMB Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, Art in America, Artforum, and ART PAPERS, where she is a Contributing Editor. She has written texts for numerous catalogues and anthologies, most recently Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism (Paper Monument). Christian is the Assistant Director of Editorial Initiatives at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. She received her MA in Art History from Hunter College. She holds a bachelor’s degree from New York University, where she double majored in Art History and Media, Culture, and Communication.