Claire Pentecost

Claire Pentecost (born 1956 in Baltimore, Maryland, United States) is an American artist, a writer, and Professor in the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. Her interdisciplinary practice interrogates the imaginative and institutional structures that organize divisions of knowledge, often focusing on nature and artificiality. Her work positions artistic practice as a research practice, advocating for the role of the amateur in the collection, interpretation, and mobilization of information. Her current projects focus on industrial and bioengineered agriculture, and the hidden costs of the global corporate food system.

Pentecost engages diverse strategies—collaboration, research, teaching, field work, writing, lecturing, drawing, installation and photography—in an ongoing interrogation of the institutional structures that order knowledge. According to her model, the artist is someone who consents to learn in public, interrogating knowledge itself in the cultural space of art, a place where values are contested. She promotes crossing and disturbing the disciplinary boundaries that traditionally limit the authorized specialist. Provided by Wikipedia