Image: Raven Chacon, The Naming of Names, 2026 (still); image courtesy Raven Chacon and Prelinger Archives; © Raven Chacon
SFMOMA will present "New Work: Raven Chacon" on its sixth floor from 24 October 2026 to 7 November 2027. It is the first solo exhibition on the West Coast for the Pulitzer Prize–winning composer and artist, whose sound and visual work draws on Diné (Navajo) worldviews and, as the museum puts it, centres Indigenous perspectives and sovereignty.
The core of the show is The Naming of Names (2026), a newly commissioned seven-channel video installation that takes visitors across the landscapes of the Navajo Nation. Chacon combines silent footage shot by foreign travellers in the 1950s and 1960s, drawn from San Francisco's Prelinger Archives, with the science fiction stories of Ray Bradbury, and sets the images to his own score of field recordings and electronic music. By recasting the deserts and canyons of the Southwestern tribal lands he comes from as something otherworldly, the work, according to SFMOMA, unsettles the narrow way these places have been pictured and questions the colonial viewpoint behind the original footage.
Alongside the installation, layered topographical drawings place Tséyiʼ, also known as Canyon de Chelly, next to Valles Marineris on Mars, connecting canyons on two planets and compressing distance and time.
The commission opens during the United States' Semiquincentennial, and the museum presents it as a reflection on the continuing expansion and renaming of territory that has accompanied the country's occupation of these lands. Chacon's imagined landscapes also point, SFMOMA says, to longer histories of the human and non-human inhabitants of places on Earth and beyond. A related feature on the museum's site, Raven Chacon's Martian Home Movies, looks at how the installation was made.
The exhibition belongs to SFMOMA's New Work series, which since 1987 has given living artists room to try out a new idea or body of work, and which the museum credits with helping to shape its collection and programming.
