Artists Raven Chacon and Guillermo Galindo bridge worlds of contemporary sound art, acoustic composition, noise, Indigenous activism, and visual art. Their projects and collaborations draw on Indigenous and Mexican symbology and ritual items, activating amplified objects, as well as a long history of American experimental music stemming from John Cage and subsequent composers. They were both commissioned by the Kronos Quartet’s 50 for the Future Project, and have been presented by documenta 14 (Germany), Western Front (Vancouver), and many other venues. The performance will be followed by a Q&A with the artists and curator Gabriel Saloman Mindel.

Raven Chacon

Raven Chacon (born 1977) is a Diné artist known as a composer of chamber music, as well as a solo performer of noise music. He was born in Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, Arizona, United States. Chacon attended the California Institute of the Arts, where he received an MFA in music composition and was a student of James Tenney, Morton Subotnick, Michael Pisaro and Wadada Leo Smith. Chacon also performs in the groups KILT with Bob Bellerue, Mesa Ritual with William Fowler Collins, Endlings with John Dieterich, and collaborations with Laura Ortman. In 2016, he was commissioned by Kronos Quartet to compose a work for their Fifty For The Future project. Chacon serves as Composer-in-Residence with the Native American Composers Apprenticeship Project. He has received awards and honors including a Creative Capital Visual Arts Grant (2012), a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship in Music (2014), and the Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin (2018).

Guillermo Galindo

The extent of the work of experimental composer, sonic architect, performance artist and visual media artist Guillermo Galindo, redefines the conventional limits between music, the art of music composition and the intersections between art disciplines, politics, humanitarian issues, spirituality and social awareness.

His acoustic work includes two commissioned orchestral compositions by the OFUNAM (Mexico University Orchestra) and the Oakland Symphony Orchestra and Choir, solo instrumental works, two operas, sonic sculptures, visual arts, computer interaction works, electro-acoustic music, film, instrument building, three-dimensional immersive installations and live improvisation. 

Guillermo Galindo presently teaches at the California College of Arts in San Francisco and has also been invited as a Mohr Visiting Artist at Stanford University (2018) and as a resident artist at Vanderbilt University and a Thomas P. Johnson Distinguished Visiting Scholar 2019 at the Rollins Cornell Arts Museum. He has also been a recipient of the Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Grant.