Claire Pentecost

(Baltimore, USA, 1956)

Artist, writer, and professor in the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. Artist, writer, and professor in the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Graduated from Smith College, Northampton, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her poetic and inductive drawings, sculptures, and installations have a telluric nature, intertwined in the celebration of the nature that sustains us. Her projects often address the contested line between the natural and the artificial, focusing for many years on food, agriculture, bioengineering, and anthropogenic changes to the indivisible living entity that animates our planet. She understands artistic practice as research and shakes up disciplinary structures to question knowledge. In Soil-erg. 2012 she proposes a currency system that moves from symbolic value to materiality, proposing compost and organic materials as currency. Our Bodies Our Soils, is an installation where she inventoried soils from farms in the London area. At Converge 45, it is a multi-faceted project in which a cotton American flag was composted in a worm bin, generating a living flag. Her work has been exhibited at Documenta 14 Kassel, Germany; 13th Istanbul Biennial; WhiteChapel, London; 3RD Mongolia Earth Art Biennial; Higher Pictures, New York; Corcoran Museum, Washington, DC; Milwaukee Art Museum; Whitney Museum, Stamford, CT; Transmediale 05, Berlin; and American Fine Arts, New York.