Claire Pentecost, Professor and Chair, Department of Photography, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
For her upcoming lecture series contribution, Pentecost will be presenting formal responses to her research into soil, microbes and money, Pentecost will demonstrate the artistic position she calls “the public amateur.”
Claire Pentecost’s work engages collaboration, research, teaching, writing, lecturing, drawing, installation and photography in an ongoing interrogation of the institutional structures that organize knowledge. Her projects often address the contested boundary between the natural and the artificial, focusing in recent years on food, agriculture and bio-engineering. She has collaborated with Critical Art Ensemble and the late Beatriz daCosta, and since 2006 she has worked with Brian Holmes, 16Beaver and many others organizing a series of seminars to articulate the interlocking scales of our existence in the logic of globalization. In the Midwest, she collaborates with Compass, initiating a series of public hearings on the activities of the Monsanto Corporation. Recently Pentecost has exhibited at dOCUMENTA(13), Whitechapel Gallery, and the 13th Istanbul Biennial. 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.