Smithsonian Acquires Music by Arévalo Mateus

Ethnomusicology Ph.D candidate Jorge Arévalo Mateus’ musical score and sound collage for Native artists James Luna’s (Luiseño) installation, “Chapel for Pablo Tac,” was recently acquired by the Smithsonian Institution-National Museum of the American Indian, as part of the museum’s permanent collection of contemporary art. The multimedia work will appear in the upcoming exhibition Vantage Point: The Contemporary Native Art Collection, in Washington, D.C., Sept. 25 to Aug. 7, 2011.

Arévalo Mateus describes the work as a “composite of historical and contemporary source musical elements brought together to sonically demonstrate and elucidate Luna’s ritual of renewal.”

He adds, “the ‘compositional process’ was intended to reflect issues of repatriation and recuperation of indigenous cultures, as well as confronting nationalist and colonialist ideologies.”