Tamarind Talks: Raven Chacon

Hear the Pulitzer Prize–winning local composer and artist speak about Tiguex, a city–wide performance featuring twenty site-specific movements and a lithographic edition, printed and published by Tamarind Institute, that serves as the musical composition’s map and score. Chacon, a 2023 MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient and University of New Mexico alum, will be joined by author and University of New Mexico Professor of Musicology/Ethnomusicology Dr. Ana Alonso-Minutti.

Raven Chacon is a composer, performer, and installation artist born at Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. A recording artist over the span of 24 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, Swiss Institute Contemporary Art New York, 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.

Ana Alonso Minutti is Professor of Musicology and Associate Chair of the Department of Music at the University of New Mexico. Her scholarship focuses on experimental sound practices and music from Mexico and the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. She is the author of Mario Lavista: Mirrors of Sounds (Oxford University Press, 2023), which received the Robert M. Stevenson Award from the American Musicological Society. In 2024, she was appointed to the Cátedra Jesús C. Romero by Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (INBAL). Also a composer, her choral work Voces del desierto won the 2021 Stevenson Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. She currently coedits the journal Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge University Press).

This program is free and open to the public, made possible through the Frederick Hammersley Fund for the Arts at the Albuquerque Community Foundation.