Each year, United States Artists (USA) awards $50,000 fellowships to the country's most accomplished and innovative artists working in the fields of
Architecture & Design, Crafts, Dance, Literature, Media, Music,
Theater & Performance, Traditional Arts and Visual Arts. Former DMV artist (now living in Chicago) and one of the 100 in my book about DC artists, Jefferson
Pinder is the recipient of the Joyce Fellowship in Performance and
Theater.
Fellows are selected through a rigorous,
highly competitive process involving hundreds of experts, scholars,
administrators and artists. USA Fellows spotlight the importance of
originality across every creative discipline, celebrating the broad
diversity of American artistic practices from coast to coast,
cultivating a creative ecology that is diverse in age, race, religion,
gender, and sexual orientation. Past
recipients of USA Fellowships include visual artists Glenn Ligon, Kara
Walker, Theaster Gates and Catherine Opie; cartoonist Chris Ware;
designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy (of Rodarte); performing artist
Meredith Monk; jazz composer Jason Moran; ballet dancer and
choreographer Benjamin Millepied; choreographer Bill T. Jones; and
writers Annie Proulx and Sapphire.
For more information about USA Fellowships, click here.
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 with light and sound or
his intensely grueling corporeal performances, he delves into
conversations about race. His exploration of sound, music and physical
performance are conceptual threads to examine history, cultural
appropriation, and portrayals of exertion and labor. Creating collaged
audio clips and surreal performances he under score themes dealing with
Afro-Futurism and endurance.
His work 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 Phillips Collection, and the National
Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. At present, Pinder is preparing for
the 2016 Shanghai Biennale, and has just finished a sculptural
installation at the new Smithsonian Museum of African American History
and Culture. Pinder resides in Chicago where he is a Professor in the
Sculpture department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
For more information on Jefferson Pinder, click here.
For available artworks by Pinder, who is represented locally by Curator's Office, click here.
Jefferson Pinder is ALSO representing the USA in the current 11th Shanghai Biennale with a work entitled Black Portal (2015). The exhibition is called "Why Not Ask Again: Arguments,
Counter-arguments, and Stories" and takes place at the Power Station of
Art, the first state-run museum dedicated to contemporary art in
mainland China. It was curated by Raqs Media Collective and co-organized
by Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi.
For more information about the 11th Shanghai Biennale, click here.