Description

In This is Not a Drill, Jefferson Pinder will be training a team of performers to venture into the deep south during the Summer of 2019. Taking inspiration from Goat Island’s How Dear to me the hour when Daylight Dies, he will aggressively prepare black bodies for stylized militancy in the face of history and white nationalism.

About the Artist

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 Fellow.

About Gallery 400

Gallery 400, a not-for-profit arts space at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), supports contemporary art, architecture, and design through exhibitions, lectures, publications, and programs that prioritize interpretative reflection and critical inquiry.

Gallery 400’s mission is to be a contemporary art hub for social interaction, transformative experience, and multi-dimensional learning. Creating a place to connect, Gallery 400 actively positions its exhibitions and public programs as opportunities with which to build community and as avenues for learning in informal social settings.

Operating within the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago—the largest university in Chicago and one of the most diverse in the US—Gallery 400 endeavors to make the arts and its practitioners accessible to a broad spectrum of the public and to cultivate a variety of cultural and intellectual perspectives. Gallery 400 is recognized for its support of the creation of new work, the diversity of its programs and participants, and the development of experimental models for multi-disciplinary exhibition.