Raven Chacon: A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak | New York Times

Dec 12 2024


By Holland Cotter

This was a year whose high points included Joan Jonas’s luminous survey, the extravaganza “PST ART,” and the 24-karat beauty of a show “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350.”

Art-wise, 2024 had an in-between-things vibe. It was a year of big-deal biennials, but the consensus was that none delivered much firepower. There was a lot of talk about money — what sold for what, and to whom — but no radically record-busting news. In general, the institutional art world veered, as it always does, between uplift (some strong museum shows) and cringe (the $6.2 million banana). I’ll go mostly with uplift in the (unranked) list of highlights below.

In a Whitney Biennial four years ago, Raven Chacon, a Pulitzer-winning Navajo composer and artist, made a haunting impression with a sound piece called “Silent Choir (Standing Rock),” an aural recording of a voiceless Native American protest. A 2024 survey of his work, “A Worm’s Eye View From a Bird’s Beak,” at Swiss Institute in Manhattan encompassing videos, a pictographic mural and compositions scored for wind, voice and gunshots expanded our sense of his range. Like the work of John Cage and Yoko Ono, who influenced him, his is art for ear, eye and mind. (Read our review of the show.)