Curator's Office is thrilled to announce that artist
Jefferson Pinder has won a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in the Fine Arts Category. A celebrated national artist, he will also be one of five artists honored by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at their Spring Gala on May 6. Concurrently, Pinder has a solo exhibition entitled
Ghost Light at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa through June 4, 2017.
"Jefferson Pinder's work provokes commentary about race and struggle. Focusing primarily with neon, found objects, and video, Pinder investigates identity through the most dynamic circumstances and materials. Through his meditative exploration of light and sound, or his intensely grueling corporeal performances, he delves into conversations about race. His physical performances are threads to examine history, cultural appropriation, and portrayals of exertion and labor. Creating collaged audio clips and surreal performances, he under-scores themes dealing with Afro-Futurism and endurance. Most recently, Pinder has traveled to Iowa to address social issues dealing with being a minority in the Midwest. Practicing performance techniques from Augusto Boal's
Theatre of the Oppressed
, he has provided opportunities for underrepresented voices to be heard.
Pinder has been featured in numerous group and solo shows including exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, Showroom Mama in Rotterdam, Netherlands, The Tate Modern in the UK, The Phillips Collection, and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. Recently, Pinder was exhibited at the 2016 Shanghai Biennale, and at the new Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. In November, he was awarded the 2016 USA Joyce Fellowship Award in the field of performance." He also is the recipient of the 2017 Moving Image Acquisition Prize awarded by the 21c Museum group. A former resident of the Washington, DC area, Pinder now resides in Chicago where he is a Professor in the Sculpture department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago."
For the exhibition at the Figge Art Museum, Pinder posits the question, "How often does a community look at itself through the eyes of 'the other'"? On March 4, he create a site-specific and performance based installation exploring race and conditioning in the Midwest. Based on several months of research, Pinder directs community members to comment on the divisions and complexities of race-relations in the region and across the nation illuminating lives and personal perspectives in the process. These multi-faceted portraits form the heart of Jefferson Pinder: Ghost Light. Through the symbol of the "Ghost Light", Pinder references the theatrical superstition in which the darkened stage is illuminated by a light, often a single electric bulb mounted to a stand, intended to ward off the theater's ghosts. In the absence of a performance, the Ghost Light becomes representative of all of the lives and narratives that have inhabited that space."
Jefferson Pinder is represented by Curator's Office.
