SITE SANTA FE presents a special day of collaborative performance featuring three MacArthur Fellows: Artist Teresita Fernández, Composer Raven Chacon (Dine/Chicano), and Poet Natalie Diaz (citizen of the Gila River Indian Community/Akimel O'odham), followed by a group conversation guided by Curator Candice Hopkins (citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation).

The program is presented in two parts, each offering reflections on land, water, and place.

11:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Part 1: PERFORMANCE
Teresita Fernández presents a visual essay titled Pauses Along A Curving Timeline, followed by a performance with Raven Chacon and Natalie Diaz featuring sound and poetry. Audience members will be immersed in the program in a unique seating arrangement.

2:30 - 3:30 PM
Part 2: DISCUSSION
Following the performance, Teresita Fernández, Raven Chacon, and Natalie Diaz are joined by Candice Hopkins for reflective dialog. The conversation will examine representation and agency within artist practices concerned with our relationship to land.

About the Presenters

Teresita Fernández (2005 Fellow) expansively rethinks what constitutes landscape. Her artistic practice and research move from the subterranean to the cosmic, and from political borders to the elusive psychic landscapes people carry within. Unraveling the intimacies between matter, human beings, and locations, Fernández poetically challenges ideas of site and landscape by exposing the history of colonization and the inherent violence embedded in how we imagine and define place and, by extension, one another.

Natalie Diaz (2018 Fellow) is a poet blending personal, political, and cultural references in works that challenge the systems of belief underlying contemporary American culture. She connects her own experiences as a Mojave American and Latina woman to widely recognized cultural and mythological touchstones, creating a personal mythology that viscerally conveys the oppression and violence that continue to afflict Indigenous Americans in a variety of forms.

Raven Chacon (2023 Fellow) is a composer and artist creating musical experiences that explore relationships among sound, space, and people. In an experimental practice that cuts across the boundaries of visual art, performance, and music, Chacon breaks open musical traditions and activates spaces of performance where the histories of the lands the United States has encroached upon can be contemplated, questioned, and reimagined.

Candice Hopkins is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation and lives in Red Hook, New York. Her writing and curatorial practice explore the intersections of history, contemporary art, and Indigeneity. She is executive director of Forge Project, Taghkanic, NY, and Senior Curator for the 2019 and 2022 editions of the Toronto Biennial of Art. She was part of the curatorial team for the Canadian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, featuring the work of the media art collective Isuma, and co-curator of notable exhibitions, including the national traveling survey Art for New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now; SITElines.2018: Casa Tomada, SITE SANTA FE; documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; and Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

This program was generously made possible by the MacArthur Foundation.