Declaration (for youth orchestra)
Raven Chacon, 2026
Stone lithograph and chine collé
Edition of 25
Image: 25 x 36 inches
Paper: 30 ¼ x 41 ¼ inches
Starting at $4,900 unframed
(Price will increase every 5 impressions reserved or sold. Price subject to increase without notice.)
Highpoint Editions is honored to present Declaration (for youth orchestra), a new print by artist and composer Raven Chacon. This new stone lithograph, inspired by a powerful orchestral composition intended to be performed by youth, examines the whistle’s historical association with policing and its shift towards an instrument of collective warning, resistance, and protection.
Close up on the stone Chacon drew on to create Declaration (for youth orchestra)
Chacon drawing with a lithographic crayon on the stone surface
In 2025, Raven Chacon was commissioned by Arco Ensemble to compose an orchestral piece for the DC Youth Orchestra, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that provides ensemble-based classical music education to young people, many from communities historically underrepresented in classical music. Chacon’s composition features whistles, reimagining an instrument associated with policing as a tool for communities to warn and protect one another from abuses of authority. Performed collectively by young musicians of varied backgrounds, abilities, and vulnerabilities, the whistles become a means of amplifying young people’s voices and protecting their families and communities. Their collective sound serves as a declaration of resistance, care, and sovereignty.
Detail of Declaration (for youth orchestra)
The composition was scheduled to premiere at the Kennedy Center in August 2026. As the project developed, changes to the venue’s name prompted a shift in the score’s meaning and context. Rather than cancel the performance, Chacon intended to bring the work directly into the belly of the beast, with seventy young musicians blowing their longest breaths into police whistles, with interjections of warning blasts and moments of rest and regrouping. Ultimately, the concert did not take place as planned. The score, however, remains, and the students are ready.
Chacon working with Lead Printer in Residence Judith Baumann
Detail of Declaration (for youth orchestra)
Through the physicality of his mark-making, Chacon gives visual form to the score’s rhythmic qualities, allowing the movement of the artist’s hand to echo the collective force intended for the musicians themselves. Chacon’s visualization of the score was hand-drawn by the artist on a lithographic stone using a range of techniques, including lithographic crayon and concentrated tusche wash applied with a syringe, brush, and tjanting tool. His first foray into stone lithography, Declaration (for youth orchestra) captures the artist’s hand in every mark and gesture, translating the rhythms, movements, and flows of music into a visual language. More than a representation of the planned composition, the resulting image extends the score, and the gestures embedded in the lithographic process offer another way of experiencing the composition, even in its absence.
Chacon signing the prints in the Highpoint Editions Studio
Chacon cancelling the stone in the Highpoint Editions Studio
For availability and to purchase Declaration (for youth orchestra), email our Gallery Director Alex Blaisdell alex@highpointprintmaking.org
Photo by Neal Santos
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.
