The short version
- Raven Chacon’s The Naming of Names opens at SFMOMA on October 24 and runs until November 7, 2027, on Floor 6.
- It sets silent 1950s and 1960s archival film and Ray Bradbury’s Martian stories against Chacon’s own field recordings and electronic compositions.
- Drawings of Canyon de Chelly hang beside drawings of Valles Marineris on Mars, a way of asking who names land and who claims it.
Raven Chacon, the Diné composer who won the Pulitzer Prize for music, opens a new commission at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on Saturday, October 24. The Naming of Names (2026) is a multichannel video installation on Floor 6. It cuts silent film from the 1950s and 1960s, taken from the Prelinger Archives, against Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950), so that the American Southwest reads like another planet.
The sound is Chacon’s own. The museum describes his field recordings and electronic compositions, and its August announcement promised spaghetti-western instrumentals and drone. Chacon works across Western classical, avant-garde and noise traditions. Here the soundtrack does the work of the missing dialogue. Topographical drawings set Tséyiʼ (Canyon de Chelly) beside Valles Marineris on Mars. The museum frames the piece around the Doctrine of Discovery and the renaming of Indigenous land, timed to the US Semiquincentennial.
The show runs until November 7, 2027, with member previews on October 23 and 24, and is included with general admission. It joins a busy season of sound in galleries, including Cevdet Erek in New York and Tarek Atoui at Tate Modern.
