A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.

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Jefferson Pinder

Professor, Presidential Professor

Contact

Bio

BA, 1993, University of Maryland; MFA, 2003, University of Maryland, College Park. Exhibitions: The Studio Museum, NY; The National Portrait Gallery, DC; Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art, Hartford; Zacheta National Gallery, Warsaw; Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam. Publications: Art in American, Bling and Beyond. Collections: David C. Driskell; Henry Thaggart; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; USA State Department; Yale University Art Gallery. Awards: Headlands Center for The Arts; Creative Communities Initiative Grant; Vermont Studio Center Full Award Fellowship.

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. From uncanny video portraits associated with popular music to durational work that puts the Black body in motion, his work examines physical conditioning that reveals an emotional response. 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. Pinder’s work was featured in the 2016 Shanghai Biennale and at the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. In 2016, he was awarded a United States Artist’s Joyce Fellowship Award in the field of performance and was a 2017 John S. Guggenheim Fellowship recipient. Jefferson was a 2022 Smithsonian Artist Residency Fellow and a MacDowell fellowship recipient.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This studio course focuses on themes, practices, contexts, and questions undertaken by contemporary artists and designers. Research Studio I is a course that asks students to begin to develop and connect their own work and ideas with a diverse range of artists, designers, and communities. This course engages with cultural institutions including: museums, galleries, libraries and archives as resources of critical engagement.

Students will undertake various types of research activities: a) collecting and classification, b) mapping and diagramming, c) systems of measurement, d) social interaction, e) information search systems, f) recording and representation, and g) drawing and other notational systems.


Assignments in this course are faculty directed, open-media, interdisciplinary and idea based. The projects are designed to help students recognize their work habits, biases, strengths, and weaknesses. Students will experience a wide range of research methods and making strategies. Critique as an evaluative process used in art and design schools, is a focus in this course. Various methods and models of critique are used in order to give students the tools to discuss their own work and the work of others.

Class Number

1240

Credits

3

Description

This course is an introduction to the materials, methods, and concepts of sculpture. We will investigate making in relation to material, time and space. We will consider aspects of sculpture such as meaning, scale, process, social engagement, ephemera and site; and explore the formal properties and expressive potential of materials including mold making and casting, wood, metal and experimental media. We will combine the use of materials and methods with ideas that reflect the history of contemporary sculpture. Demonstrations and authorizations will provide students with experience and technical proficiency in sculptural production while readings and slide lectures venture into the critical discourses of sculpture.

Class Number

1769

Credits

3

Description

This studio course explores the 'performing object' in contemporary, avant-garde, and traditional sculpture, installation, performance, and theater. Through experimentation and critical discussion, issues specific to performance art, puppetry, mask and street theater are probed, including: material, movement, sound, text, spectacle, scale, environment, and relationships among performer, puppet, and audience. In addition to in-class exercises, students build and perform a newly conceived, object-based performance piece.

Class Number

1712

Credits

3