New Work: Raven Chacon opens October 24 at SFMOMA, on Floor 6, with entry included in general admission. The museum's exhibition page lists a run through November 7, 2027.
Chacon's The Naming of Names combines material from the Prelinger Archives with an artist-composed soundtrack and drawings. SFMOMA describes footage made by foreign travelers in the 1950s and 1960s and a relationship to Ray Bradbury's science fiction. Chacon rearranges those earlier views of the landscape through a new sequence, soundtrack and set of drawings.
Silent travel footage, new sound
The museum connects Chacon’s practice to Diné perspectives and Indigenous sovereignty. The travelers’ recordings and Chacon’s later arrangement bring different perspectives to the same landscapes.
The commission has seven video channels, so no single glance can contain the whole arrangement. SFMOMA identifies the source films as silent recordings; the field recordings and electronic music belong to Chacon's later composition. The sound heard in the installation was composed separately from the images.
The accompanying drawings pair Tséyiʼ, also called Canyon de Chelly, with Valles Marineris on Mars. That pairing makes the Bradbury reference more specific than a general science-fiction mood: a landscape on Indigenous land and a landscape on another planet enter the same visual comparison. The museum's season announcement places the commission among its 2026 exhibitions. Its October opening is the new event; the source footage remains a record of earlier travelers' decisions.
