The Brooklyn Rail

The stories we tell ourselves give order to our world and meaning to our existence. Although dominant culture narratives get written into history through sheer force, the alternate tellings whispered around dinner tables offer rich perspectives and reveal hidden truths. Composer, performer, and installation artist Raven Chacon (Diné) continues uplifting these counter-narratives in Scores for Coming Storms, this time focusing on the origin stories of our American project.

In this compact show, Chacon helps us reimagine how we know who we are. The scores on view, leaving much room for interpretation, are rendered in ink and graphite, and embedded in cloth, allowing the performer to enact them through their own experience. American Ledger No. 1 (2018) is drawn directly on the wall in graphite. The work, to be performed using percussion instruments, coins, an axe and wood, a police whistle, and a match, is described as “To be displayed as a flag, a wall, a blanket, a billboard, or a door.” Its graphic notation, to be read from top to bottom and left to right, includes Western music symbols, such as rests, repeats, whole, quarter, and sixteenth notes, allusions to the five-line musical staff and bow markings, and other pictorial symbols, such as crosses and stars.

The work provides a gateway to sharing a different story of creation, one that acknowledges not only the triumph of industry and progress, but also the profound impact empire’s violences had on the people and natural ecosystems that were disturbed, displaced, erased, and remade in its image. Each line, to be performed for a minute or more for a minimum of thirteen minutes, can be played by any number of non-musicians using a variety of interpretations. Line 1, for example, can be performed using articulated and sustained tones, as indicated by a whole note followed by a zig-zagging line capped by an arrowhead that leads to a repeated phrase of swooping, wave-like gestures punctured by x’s at regular intervals. The score concludes at Line 7 with a solid graphite bar, denoting the final conquest of Indigenous people and their way of life, or as the instructions indicate, “Chop wood. End with everyone and everything.”

This exhibition’s centerpiece is framed by more modestly sized ink drawings, including three pieces made for Chacon’s composition Tiguex, a work comprising twenty overlapping musical movements that were performed over a single day in 2025. These drawings (Excerpts from Tiguex No. 1, 2, and 3 [all 2026) are part of the edition of the score—a map of modern day Albuquerque—that marked where each movement would be performed around the city as well as the geographic beauty and diversity of the Rio Grande Valley.

The second room of the exhibition features Storm Pattern (2021/24), a handwoven, woolen textile score and a multi-channel sound installation composed of drone field recordings captured at the Standing Rock Oceti Sakowin camp during Thanksgiving weekend in 2016. The work’s title is a reference to the traditional Diné weaving design; Chacon’s textile uses a similar pattern of stepped, diagonal lines that extend to the outer edges from a central square. The perimeter of the textile is lined with overlapping zagging lines inside rectangles, like jagged sound-waves radiating out to the rug’s four corners.

Against this backdrop, the sound installation plays, bringing to mind the moments before a performance when orchestra musicians warm-up their instruments. This cacophony eventually calibrates to the ear like the ison note one might hear in historical Byzantine chants that provides the foundation in the background. This pedal tone ensconced by the buzzing sizzle-sounds of the machines circling and diving over the campsite merge seamlessly, their harmonies underscoring the tension inherent in this tale of a fight for sovereignty.

Stories entertain and compel. They communicate our values, hold our memories, and preserve our cultural traditions for future generations, making their telling a sacred act that connects past to present, and offering the possibility for a sustainable future. Scores for Coming Storms offers a hopeful reminder that our stories not only hold our memories and culture; they also hold our collective power and provide fuel for resistance.