July 3, 2025 — Today, Civitella is proud to celebrate the successful runs of two exhibitions by Elle Perez, Visual Arts Fellow joining us at the Castle later this summer, and Raven Chacon, composer and interdisciplinary artist, joining us as a Director’s Guest in 2027. Both shows traced deeply personal and political relationships to history, space, and sound.
Elle Pérez (b. 1989) offers The World Is Always Again Beginning, History with the Present—an intimate and expansive portrait of community, kinship, and the act of witnessing. Pérez began making photographs at Bronx punk shows as a teenager, documenting ephemeral, shared moments of joy, rage, and solidarity. Two decades later, their practice continues to center collaboration and trust, creating images that are not only seen but held—by the people in them and the people who need them.
Their new exhibition spans early works, revised and recontextualized, alongside recent photographs taken in their grandfather’s garden in Puerto Rico and at Brooklyn’s iconic queer dance party, Papi Juice. A prose poem flows across the walls of the gallery, anchoring the visual archive in language that is both lyrical and exacting. “Form is relational,” Pérez writes, “and always re-inventing itself.” So too is memory, and the communities we build to carry it.
In Aviary, Raven Chacon (b. 1977, Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation) transforms the adjacent North Gallery into a sonic chamber of resonance and resistance. Known for his site-responsive practice, Chacon began his exploration by listening—clapping his hands and counting the reverberation as it faded across the glass ceiling and Spanish tile of the Beaux Arts building designed by Cass Gilbert. That echo lasted six full seconds.
Intrigued by the layered histories of the site—including its ties to John James Audubon and his Birds of America—Chacon conceived a sound installation that brings attention to the voices and histories that have long been silenced. Aviary invites us to pause, listen, and consider the acoustics of power: what persists, what disappears, and what can still be heard. A series of live performances by musicians and vocalists were also activated in the space throughout the run of the show.
Both exhibitions were curated by Jenny Jaskey, Chief Curator at Arts and Letters, and supported by the Wolf Kahn Foundation.
