MFA Critic Lecture: Claire Pentecost
Claire Pentecost is an artist and writer whose poetic and inductive drawings, sculpture, and installations test and celebrate the conditions that bound and define life itself. Her projects often address the contested line between the natural and the artificial, focusing for many years on food, agriculture, bioengineering, and anthropogenic changes in the indivisible living entity that animates our planet.
Since 2006 she has worked with Brian Holmes, 16Beaver, and many others organizing Continental Drift, a series of seminars to articulate the interlocking scales of our existence in the logic of globalization. A sample of Pentecost’s exhibition venues include dOCUMENTA(13), Whitechapel Gallery, the 13th Istanbul Biennial, Nottingham Contemporary, the DePaul Art Museum, and the Land Art Mongolia Third Biennial. Institutions inviting her to lecture include Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, MIT, CalArts, the Rhode Island School of Design, Northwestern University, Rice University, the University of Virginia, and Creative Time Summit. She is represented by Higher Pictures, New York, and is Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.