Jefferson Pinder's "Gust." Photo: Courtesy of Bob. (Robert Salazar and Robert Heischman)

Jefferson Pinder’s Gust is included in A Tale of Today: Materialities at the Driehaus Museum.

February 7 to April 27, 2025

50 E. Erie Street, Chicago, IL 60611

Materialities invites artists to select a specific material from the Driehaus Museum to engage in a new materialist dialogue with it. In conversation with guest curator Dr. Giovanni Aloi, the artists will research the histories of their chosen material to produce an engaged, critically aware, integrated response designed to uncover hidden cultural, historical, and ecological networks that bind the very fabric of the house to distant shores, peoples, skill sets, traditions, ideologies, and economic forces.  

Selected Press:

https://observer.com/2025/02/exhibition-review-materialities-driehaus-museum/

https://chicago.suntimes.com/art/2025/02/27/richard-driehaus-river-north-chicago-museum-exhibit-materialities

Still from float, HD digital recording of a live performance, 2019

Jefferson Pinder’s float is included in How to Carry Water.

Stirek Gallery at Oregon State University

September 21 - December 21, 2024

Pinder will also give a talk on Wednesday, November 13, 2024 at the PRAx - Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts.

How to Carry Water brings together contemporary visual artists and humanities scholars in shared observations and questions about watersheds. In this expanded conversation, the term “watershed” refers not only to ecological structures, but also to the spatial, temporal and cultural entities that catalyze collectivity and life alongside bodies of water. The exhibition considers how the lenses of history, philosophy and creative practice allow for alternative methods of witnessing the human relationship to water.

Jefferson Pinder is invited by the Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art to present the Congress’s closing presentation, “Black to the Future.”

36th Congress of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art

Lyon, June 23-28, 2024, “Matter Materiality”

The CIHA (Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art) is the oldest international organization of art history in the world. The theme chosen for the 2024 Congress, Matter Materiality, concerns the conception, production, interpretation and conservation of works of art from all cultures and periods, and encompasses environmental and societal issues of our time. 

Jefferson Pinder, Installation image, Colored Entrance, 2017

Sean Bieri covers Jefferson Pinder’s exhibition Weapons and White Music in the Detroit Art Review.

“Weapons and White Music, a compact anthology of Pinder’s art from the last decade or so, on view at Wayne State University’s Elaine Jacob Gallery now through April 27, showcases a body of work that balances aesthetics and activism. It addresses issues of race not with unequivocal slogans but in an audio-visual language that prompts contemplation, investigation, and soul-searching. There are no handy wall labels here to coach the visitor, so inevitably, the nature of that contemplation will vary from one person to the next.”

The performance by Jefferson Pinder is one of more than 100 new acquisitions recently announced by the institution

The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) has recently acquired more than 100 works in line with the institution’s efforts to diversify its holdings, emphasizing connections to the Baltimore area and highlighting the work of women artists and artists of color. The museum is also diversifying the media represented in its holdings: interdisciplinary artist Jefferson Pinder’s Ben-Hur (2012) is the first performance art piece in the museum's collection.

Pinder’s incisive, ambitious work contemplates the intersection of art, labour politics and the Black American experience, rendering simple, dynamic conceits on an operatic scale. Ben-Hur is no exception; the performance involves six Black men engaging in actions that reference the visual history of labour in art. The BMA’s acquisition includes both 2013 video documentation of a past performance and detailed instructions on how to stage it live in future iterations.

—Torey Akers, January 12, 2024.