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

Jefferson Pinder

Professor, Presidential Professor

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Bio

Jefferson Pinder (he/him) is a time agent. Navigating media, Pinder creates interventions, videos, and objects that transport audiences to a speculative space where history and truth is negotiated. 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.

Awards

The American Academy of Rome Prize, 2025; Smithsonian Artist Residency Fellowship, 2021; John S. Guggenhiem Fellowship, 2017; USA Fellowship Award (Joyce Awardee), 2016

Publications

Phaedra Carpenter, Coloring Whiteness: Acts of Critique in Black Performance, University of Michigan Press; Celeste-Marie Bernier, Battleground: African American Art (1985–2015), The University of Georgia Press

Exhibitions

Crystal Bridges, Monumental, 2023; Shanghai Biennniale, Why Not Ask Again? Arguments, Counter-arguments, and Stories," 2016

Courses

Title	Department	Catalog	Term
Introduction to Sculptural Practices	Sculpture	1101 (002)	Fall 2026
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 1916 Credits 3
Grad Projects:Sculpture	Sculpture	6009 (004)	Fall 2026
Description Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.		Class Number 2140 Credits 3 - 6

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