UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The College of Arts and Architecture’s School of Visual Arts will continue its annual Anderson Lecture Series by welcoming performance-based and multidisciplinary artist Jefferson Pinder on Wednesday, Oct. 20 at 2:30 p.m. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be held at the Kern Graduate Building.
The lecture series is supported by the John Muller Anderson endowment, which was named in honor of the professor emeritus who was an Evan Pugh research professor of philosophy and the first director of Penn State’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities.
Pinder, self-identified as a “time agent” navigating time’s fluidity, creates interventions, videos and objects that transport audiences to a speculative space where history’s symbolism is negotiated. With his work, the body becomes a vessel for excavating the brutality and enduring traumas of the past, through performances, historic reenactments and stylized music videos.
Conjuring with neon, rust and glitter, Pinder harnesses the latent power in everyday objects to unearth unspoken truths about a racialized past. Pinder is connected to a fierce American tradition of art-making and education, emerging from a lineage rooted in his mentor David C. Driskell and James Porter before him.
His work has been featured in numerous solo and group shows including exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem; the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut; The High Museum in Atlanta, Georgis; the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; and Tate Modern in London.
In 2017, Pinder received a Guggenheim Fellowship; he also won a 2016 USA Joyce Fellowship Award in the field of performance, and in 2017 the Moving Image Acquisition Award. Most recently, he was named a 2021 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow.
Pinder received a bachelor of arts degree in theater and a master of fine arts in mixed media from the University of Maryland, and studied at the Asolo Theatre Conservatory in Sarasota, Florida. He was an assistant professor at the University of Maryland from 2003 to 2011 and is currently professor of sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.