“Pinder’s work explores the vernacular performance of Black life–probing how Black movement-building practices of protest, remembrance, and assembly can not only disrupt choreographies of state power but also rehearse new possibilities for the future.“- juror Gee Wesley, Curatorial Assistant Department of Media and Performance, MoMA.

Jefferson Pinder is the 2024 Walder Foundation Artadia Awardee.

Jefferson Pinder (b. 1970, Washington, DC) has produced highly praised performance-based and multidisciplinary work for over a decade. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group shows including exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, The High Museum in Atlanta, the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and Tate Modern in London, UK. In 2017, Pinder received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Moving Image Acquisition Award; he also won a 2016 USA Joyce Fellowship Award in the field of performance. Most recently, he was named a 2021 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow. He is currently a Professor of Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

An instigator of risky interventions. From a quiet and tactful assault on a police stronghold to sending performers adrift in the mighty Lake Michigan, Pinder mediates a conversation by any means necessary. Primarily working within the lines of performance, he utilizes video, sound, and object-making to meditate on the ritual and the human in an urbanized and highly polarized society. Through action, Pinder is constantly exploring a quagmire of representations -and misrepresentations-, myths, and visual tropes to access truthful renditions of identity.