Claire Pentecost
B. 1956 Baltimore, Maryland
Lives and works in Chicago, Illinois
Claire Pentecost is an artist and writer whose poetic and inductive drawings, sculpture, and installations test and celebrate the conditions that bound and define life itself. Her projects often address the contested line between the natural and the artificial, focusing for many years on food, agriculture, bio-engineering, and anthropogenic changes in the indivisible living entity that animates our planet. Pentecost has said she wishes to “to pass symbolic value through the flesh of materiality.”
For Converge 45, Pentecost presents Proposal for a New American Agriculture, part of a multi-faceted project in which a cotton American flag was composted in a worm bin for several months, transforming most of the flag into living soil. Since 2006 she has worked with Brian Holmes, 16 Beaver, and many others organizing Continental Drift, a series of seminars to articulate the interlocking scales of our existence in the logic of globalization. She is professor and Chair of the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.