This exhibition is a contemplation on the idea of home, its nuances and complexities. Five new large scale paintings are included. With them Nani Chacon examines how present concepts of home are inextricable from the past, she looks at the enormous efforts it can take to find, define and preserve a home, and she addresses how a secure home is essential.
These works illustrate the search for comfort and safety, for home, as an act of creation, replete with transformative moments. The historical journeys of Diné (Navajo) peoples from ancestral homelands to the present day is embedded in them. Chacon presents home not only as a physical place, but as a mechanism for survival. No one can sustain until they feel the contentment and sense of peace that finding home engenders.
These paintings are grounded in explorations of narratives from creation stories. The perspective is broadened by equal consideration through a historical lens. Specifically, reflecting on the Long Walk Diné peoples endured. A displacement which has led to an ongoing need to recreate and reimagine what home means, collectively and individually.
Through these ruminations the exhibition celebrates origin and lineage as tools of self-preservation, anchors for understanding place in the world, and vehicles for finding home again.
Chacon (b.1980 Gallup, New Mexico) is a Diné and Chicana artist who has been highly active in the public arts sector for over two decades. Although know for large scale murals her practice expands across disciplines, including illustration and installation. Last year a major solo museum exhibition at SITE Santa Fe included rope installation pieces based on weaving patterns and large-scale paintings inspired by Diné creation stories. Her numerous mural projects focus on community engagement, addressing the complexity of contemporary Indigenous culture and identities. Chacon holds that art should be accessible and a meaningful catalyst for social change, that this is possible in works embedded with nuanced concepts and addressing urgent socio-political issues. Cultural repair and radical colonial resistance through masterful visual storytelling and re-telling. These murals are reclamations of the spaces they inhabit.
Chacon received her bachelor’s in Education from the University of New Mexico in 2003. Notable Projects have been supported by; National Endowment for the Arts, Obama Foundation, California Endowment for the Arts, US Consulate and Embassy in Russia, National Museum of Mexican Art, Navajo Nation Museum, National Hispanic Cultural Center, and others. Her works have been on view at the Harwood Museum, SITE Santa Fe, the Phoenix Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, El Museo, Tucson Museum of Art, the Heard Museum, and more. She is featured in the major new publication An Indigenous Present, edited by Jeffrey Gibson.
She is currently illustrating two books, to be published by Simon & Schuster and Harper Collins, planned for 2024 & 2025.