Albuquerque-based composer and artist Raven Chacon has been awarded the prestigious and lucrative MacArthur Fellowship, also known as “genius grants”.
The no-strings, five-year fellowship is intended to encourage exceptional people to pursue their own creative or intellectual inclinations.
Chacon's work combines music, visual art and performance. It uses objects and noise, costumes and place, as much as conventional instruments and music.
"Noise can be a carrier of history, it can be a carrier of story, it can tell a lot about the person who's making it," said Chacon in a video for the MacArthur Foundation, which is a supporter of NPR.
Chacon talks about his goal of drawing attention to the original stewards of the land that's now the United States. He is Navajo.
"I'm looking at the histories of different places, the history of the United States, the lands that the United States occupies, what kind of violence is being pushed upon the people who live in these places upon the earth itself?"
Last year, Chacon was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his composition Voiceless Mass, an ensemble work originally performed in a cathedral in Milwaukee on Thanksgiving. That work reflects on gathering spaces, and the lands on which the spaces sit.
The MacArthur Fellowship pays a stipend of $800,000, paid out over the five years.
