Raven Chacon
Raven Chacon is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Diné composer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. Our collaboration came about via the network of relatives within Forge Project, a Native-led nonprofit supporting Indigenous leadership in arts, culture, food security, and land justice.
Spanning three projects and several years, my collaboration with Raven has always begun with his hand-drawn marks on paper and the task of helping bring them to life. This work of translation requires precision and the ability to retain the living essence of an organic drawing despite its digital evolution.
Collaborating with relatives is always the dream. Helping Raven carry his work across Turtle Island has been my honor.
Collaborative Scope:
— Vector Illustration + Production Design
— Scale Engineering for Large Format Murals
— Book Layout + Print Preparation
— Artwork Translation from Scan to Vector
— Art Direction + Quality Control
Credits:
— Amy White Eyes Doermann: Production Design, Vector Illustration, Print Preparation
— Raven Chacon: Artist, Composer
— Martin Fowler: Project Management
Vertical Neighbors, 2024
A composition for two pairs of brass horn instruments, presented as a large-scale mural on a building in New York City for Raven's solo exhibition at Swiss Institute NYC, A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak.
The score was built entirely by hand in Adobe Illustrator from Raven's original sketches. Every shape and symbol were rebuilt as a precise vector and engineered to scale perfectly for the mural painting.
“A performance of this composition becomes an acknowledgement of vertical orientations as temporal relationships, aligning past and future knowledge.” — Raven Chacon
Support for Vertical Neighbors is provided by the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation.
CAESURA, 2025
A collaborative graphic musical score with composer Guillermo Galindo, reimagining the train routes that shaped the American West. The work centers the experience of the hobo: an anonymous, migratory worker who did the jobs no one wanted and communicated through a pictographic code of graffiti.
Working from Raven's sketches of the score, each mark was translated into a precise vector for screen printing onto rain ponchos for display and sometimes wear during live performances at railroad yards in Ogden, Denver, and Albuquerque.
For Zitkála-Šá, 2025
A series of twelve graphic scores dedicated to contemporary American Indian, First Nations, and Mestiza women working in music and sound art, and to Zitkála-Šá herself, the Yankton Dakota composer, writer, and activist whose work helped chronicle the systemic oppression of Native people.
Working from twelve scans provided by the Whitney Museum, I digitally redrew each score, formatted and prepared them for a new lithographic print edition of the works by Derriere L’etoile Studios.