SANTA FE — Diné and Chicana painter and muralist Nani Chacon tells tales, celebrates Diné tradition, hallows Brown girls, and provides viewers a window into her world as a up to date Indigenous artist. Her work has been featured at nationally acknowledged establishments like Nationwide Hispanic Cultural Heart, Museum of Modern Native Artwork, Navajo Nation Museum, and Nationwide Museum of Mexican Artwork Chicago. SPECTRUM, an exhibition that includes 11 new large-scale works and a survey of her public murals and private archive, is at present on view at SITE Santa Fe.
“I firstly create work for my people, for Diné,” mentioned Chacon as we walked by means of the exhibition simply earlier than it opened. “I am thinking about the survival of our culture. So much of colonization, of Christianity, and of academia has silenced the ability to push these ideas forward. It does not get pushed forward unless people come and see it and witness it and contemplate it.”
For over 20 years, Chacon has been creating public artwork. Born in Gallup, New Mexico, in 1980, she grew up in each Chinlé, Arizona, on the Navajo Nation and in Corrales simply north of Albuquerque. The murals she paints function reclamation of the areas they inhabit, an act she sees as a part of her function as a future ancestor. They honor and worship Brown girls, one other factor that’s important to Chacon’s ethos as an artist.
“I want to see Brown women, big. I want to see those representations exist,” she mentioned. “Throughout time the Brown woman has not been celebrated. We can go to Europe and see these beautiful sculptures of European women and their bodies; we celebrate that figure and that presence. We haven’t done that for Brown women. I think in time it will change, and maybe I am a part of that change.”
From Diné goddesses to group leaders, Chacon depicts Brown girls in states of elegant grace, like the portrait she created honoring Dona Maclovia Zamora — a conventional herbalist and curandera (healer) — who for many years has created cures in the Barelas neighborhood of Albuquerque. Chacon defined, “I have to understand what public my pieces are going to serve, and who is going to steward them. How does the imagery elevate or uplift the public that ultimately has to care for the work?”
Chacon thinks of her works as “urban interventions.” She’s okay with their impermanence; that murals aren’t going to be preciously preserved. They’re about the messages they painting, and the approach they increase the neighborhoods they enhance. “When you’re confronted with art, it’s permission to think and it makes you engage with your landscape and in your community in a different way,” she mentioned.
In SPECTRUM, Chacon adapts her mural course of to suit a museum setting by means of large-scale acrylic works. Every one is over 9 toes tall, and between 10 and 12 toes huge, capturing characters and tales from Diné creation myths in saturated coloration palettes that really feel ethereal and earthly at the similar time. “I feel the enormity makes them unescapable, and confrontational. I want to confront people with beauty and pride and complexity.” The exhibit contains three billboards on the west facet of SITE which function murals Chacon has made in Albuquerque and Mora, New Mexico, and Chinlé, Arizona, three locations the artist feels strongly linked to.
She created 5 of the eight work in the exhibit over the final six months however mentioned the strategy of bringing them into existence has been taking place over the final 5 years. “This is a body of work I have wanted to make for a really long time, based on storytelling. I haven’t seen a lot of illustrations of our creation stories,” she instructed me. “We know so many stories, fairy tales, and mythologies from other cultures because we have an illustrated understanding and we follow that, especially as young children.”
The work “Asdzáá Nádleehé Blesses Herself in Front of the Sun” (2022) in SPECTRUM focuses on the story of Altering Girl, a deity whom the Diné individuals see as their grandmother and the goddess who created all humankind. It exhibits a Brown girl cradling herself in a golden glow of sunshine, floating on an oceanic turquoise background, as little piles of corn pollen pour down on her. This storied second echoes by means of Diné ceremonial practices in the ritual of sprinkling corn pollen overhead. The characters in SPECTRUM’s work have little yellow spots on their crowns, signifying this ritual.
Different large-scale works in the exhibition embody “Asdzáá Na’ashejé íí” (2022), which depicts Spiderwoman, the deity who taught Diné to weave. “Coyote and Badger Join the Earth and Sky and Make a Friendship for Life” (2022) exhibits the animals who’ve an necessary relationship in Diné creation mythology. “Our stories acknowledge all beings, animals, insects, people, and gods, and they are all central and important,” mentioned Chacon.
SPECTRUM additionally incorporates wider Navajo beliefs, like the sacredness of the quantity 4, which regularly seems in Diné weaving, in the 4 seasons, and 4 phases of life — childhood, adolescence, maturity, and previous age. “Four Genders Were Born…” (2022) exhibits that Navajo tradition acknowledges greater than two genders, born of their genesis story.
“The first four children that were made were two sets of twins. One was a boy, one a girl, one the embodiment of a boy in a girl, and one the embodiment of a girl in a boy. I find that entirely profound,” says Chacon. “I just see us now really struggling with sexuality beyond a binary, and that was something my ancestors already confronted, and not only confronted but accepted and wrapped into the idea of beauty and balance in the world.”
SPECTRUM features a website map of areas the place viewers can go to Chacon’s murals all through New Mexico corresponding to “Manifestations of a Glittering World” (2013), a mural in Santa Fe embedded with sparkly bits of mica; and “The River Runs Through It” (2017) in Española north of Santa Fe. Two site-specific items constructed with string, “Our Gods Walk Among Us” (2022) and “Don’t Whistle At Night” (2022) symbolize her exploration of the line and reference the Navajo’s sturdy connection to weaving. “It is important for us as Diné to continue to tell these stories,” she mentioned. “All of these paintings together are about that relationship between land and world, and the spiritual world, and who we are as people.”
