Apapacho Residents: December 2024 – January 2025
Two of Apapacho’s January residents were Candice Hopkins, curator, writer and citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation & Raven Chacon, artist and composer from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. After a period of not traveling to Mexico City, they spent their time focused on reconnecting with curators, artists and friends at the time to rediscovering the cultural wealth and heritage the city offers.
Candice Hopkins (she/her) serves as Forge Project‘s executive director and chief curator, working with contemporary Indigenous artists to shape one of the preeminent collections of Native art in the country.
Candice is a citizen of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation, spent many years in New Mexico, Canada, and Europe before moving to the unceded lands of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok in upstate New York to help build Forge into what it is today.
“Forge has a unique vision and is unlike any other organization in the country,” says Candice. “We are a small and dedicated team that is together looking to reshape dialogues on Indigenous culture.
“The absence of Indigenous voices from national conversations on history, politics, and culture broadly should not be tolerable. One question we ask ourselves at Forge is how we can create platforms for Indigenous leaders now and for those who will lead us in the future.”
When Candice is not working with Indigenous artists to reshape cultural institutions, you can find her working with her horses, Moqui and Mick.
&
Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and Swiss Institute Contemporary Art New York. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009-2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the 2-mile long land art installation Repellent Fence.
A recording artist over the span of 24 years, Chacon has appeared on more than eighty releases on various national and international labels. In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass. His 2020 Manifest Destiny opera Sweet Land, co-composed with Du Yun, received critical acclaim from The LA Times, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, and was named 2021 Opera of the Year by the Music Critics Association of North America.
Since 2004, he has mentored over 300 high school Native composers in the writing of new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). Chacon is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2022), the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022), and is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow.
His solo artworks are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and various private collections.
Questions? ¿Preguntas? Email us / Envíanos un correo electrónico: Apapacho.Res.MX@gmail.com