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

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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

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