SPIRIT ABUSE (RAVEN CHACON & NATHAN YOUNG) // PIT EROSION (WAR & MRH) // WHITE BOY SCREAM (MICAELA TOBIN)
Courtesy of Drifters Theater, Tulsa, OK.
WEDNESDAY, JULY 23, 7:00 - 9:00 PM
DOOR 7:00 PM | LIVE PERFORMANCES 8:00 - 10:30 PM
Drifter’s, 1305 W Cameron St., Tulsa, OK, 74127
Presented by Micaela Tobin and Warren Realrider with the support of Tulsa Artist Fellowship, experience an evening of boundary-pushing sound atop the Owen Park landscape at Drifters Theater. Acclaimed performers include Pulitzer Prize-winning artist Raven Chacon, Tulsa Artist Fellows Micaela Tobin (as White Boy Scream), Warren Realrider (WAR) with Matt Hex (MRH) as Pit Erosion, and Tulsa Artist Fellowship alum Nathan Young with Chacon as Spirit Abuse.
Courtesy of artists.
Raven Chacon is a Pulitzer Prize–winning composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, REDCAT, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and The Kennedy Center. His co-created artworks with Postcommodity were presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, and the 2-mile-long land art installation Repellent Fence. He has appeared on more than eighty releases internationally, including his 2020 Manifest Destiny opera Sweet Land, co-composed with Du Yun, which 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. Chacon has mentored over 300 high school Native composers in creating new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). He 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) and the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022). 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, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Getty Research Institute, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and various private collections.
Nathan Young (born 1975, Tahlequah, OK) is an artist-scholar-composer working in an expanded practice that incorporates sound, video, documentary, animation, installation, socially engaged art, and experimental music. Nathan’s work often engages the spiritual and the political, re-imagining indigenous sacred imagery to complicate and subvert notions of the sublime. Nathan is a founding and former member of the Indigenous artist collective Postcommodity and holds an MFA in Music / Sound from Bard College’s Milton-Avery School of the Arts. Nathan’s work has been supported by Creative Capital, the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, the George Kaiser Family Foundation, the Pew Foundation, and the Carnegie Mellon Foundation, among others, including the Tribeca Film Institute and the Sundance Institute. Young formerly served as an elected member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians Tribal Council (2016-2020).
Warren Realrider is a Pawnee/Crow multidisciplinary sound artist based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. While studying painting at the University of Oklahoma, he began an exploration of sound, materials, and site as elements of his art practice. Warren created the Tick-Suck noise performance project in 2016 and has since presented his solo works and sound performance collaborations in varied Oklahoma locations as well as distant locales such as Spokane and New York City. His works such as IIII Kitapâtu and Unassigned Data work within the unclaimed spaces between contemporary anti-plains existence, universe engagement, and untethered sound to create hypnotic structures of human/item interface. Realrider works to play the tensions and time locations between objects, functions, and movements to create sound pieces lashed to the frameworks of noise art, improvisation, and experimental composition. Realrider is a 2024-2026 Tulsa Artist Fellowship Awardee.
Matt Hex has been active in the Midsouth noise scene since the early 2000s, headquartered in Stilwell, OK, Tulsa, OK, and Ft. Smith, AR areas, though he travels across the US frequently. He has been a part of numerous extreme music, experimental, and noise projects and collaborative supergroups, such as Stalking, Flora Morte, and Licking Wounds, to name only a very few. However, Bonemagic has arguably been the most prominent and consistent project throughout his life.
Micaela Tobin (White Boy Scream) is a composer and sound artist who merges operatic technique with noise, electronics, and ritual performance to explore identity, resistance, and empowerment. Performing under the moniker White Boy Scream, she uses her soprano voice to dismantle colonial frameworks and express her diasporic experience as a first-generation Filipina-American. Her critically acclaimed albums BAKUNAWA and APOLAKI blend sonic ritual, ancestral memory, and myth, with The Wire naming BAKUNAWA a top release of 2020 and Passion of the Weiss praising APOLAKI as “a brilliant showcase” of artistic evolution. Tobin’s live sets oscillate between harsh noise, drone, and extended vocal textures, pushing opera into immersive and defiant new territory. As a composer-director, she premiered her first cinematic opera BAKUNAWA: Opera of the Seven Moons at REDCAT and debuted her second, APOLAKI: Opera of the Scorched Earth, at Zorthian Ranch in 2023. Tobin is a 2025–2027 Tulsa Artist Fellow and lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Tulsa Artist Fellowship strives to provide a welcoming and accessible experience. Our exhibitions and programs are free, documented, and archived.
Established in 2015, the Tulsa Artist Fellowship was created as a place-based initiative by the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF) to address pressing challenges faced by contemporary artists and arts workers living in and joining Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa Artist Fellowship believes the arts are critical to advancing cultural citizenship and supports community-invested practitioners who intentionally engage with our city.
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