Claire Pentecost

Claire Pentecost. Courtesy of the artist.

Claire Pentecost, “Soil-erg”. Materials: soil, paper, graphite, glass, gold leaf, wire and plants. Courtesy of the artist.

Claire Pentecost, “Library of Tears.” Materials: glass, wire, string, Texas sweet crude, Bakken crude, tar sands bitumen, petroleum coke, aluminum, sulfur, nickel, mercury, leaves, fur, eggshell, feathers, hair, seeds and wool. Courtesy of the artist.

Claire Pentecost, “For the body without organs to sense .” Materials: vintage coalminer’s birdcages, molded petroleum coke, canary. Courtesy of the artist.

Claire Pentecost, “The force that through the fossil drives my greased age.” Materials: motorboat, wood, brass wire. Courtesy of the artist.

Claire Pentecost, “Proposal for a New American Agriculture.” Materials: vermicomposted American flag. Courtesy of the artist.

Claire Pentecost is an artist and writer who researches the living matters of food, agriculture and bio-engineering; her Soil-erg project of 2012 considered the material of soil as a commodity, proposing a soil-based currency system.

Pentecost’s work is driven by research but inspired by questions of form. She advocates for the role of the amateur in the production and interpretation of knowledge, while her longstanding interest in nature and artificiality predicates her recent responses to anthropogenic climate change. Past projects focused on industrial and bioengineered agriculture in a global, corporate food system.

Pentecost has exhibited work nationally and internationally at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany; 13th Istanbul Biennial; WhiteChapel, London; 3^rd Mongolian Land 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. She is professor and chair of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and holds degrees from Smith College and the Pratt Institute.

Press
art 21 magazine, 5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Claire Pentecost
The New York Time, Claire Pentecost: “Interior Studies”