Claire Pentecost

Human as Euphemism

Solo Exhibition - Cultivator at Bray Grove Farm

Sunday, June 8, 2025, 2-5pm

Cultivator is pleased to present Claire Pentecost’s exhibition Human as Euphemism, during Bray Grove Farm’s Spring Farm Day. This exhibition coincides with Christine Forni’s presentation of Drawing You Outside.

Please rsvp to join us on Sunday, June 8th from 2-5pm for art, conversation, light refreshments, and an afternoon on our small holistic farm. You can drop in anytime between 2-5pm. We are tentatively scheduling a drawing walk with Christine at 2:30pm, a walkaround with Claire at 3:15pm, and a tour of the farm with Brian and Joanne at 4pm. Bray Grove Farm is located 70 miles southwest of Chicago in Grundy County. To confirm your attendance and receive directions and parking information, kindly email joanne@cultivatorarts.com.

An artist who delves deep into her subject matter, Claire Pentecost questions, researches, writes, and creates art that invites the viewer to join her search for answers on topics such as climate change, soil as an economic measure, and industrial food production. Her art can take the form of drawing, painting, photography, writing, assemblage, performance, and installation.

Her constructions of anthropomorphic beings made from discarded objects, animal masks, and manipulated materials create settings for Cultivator attendees to discover as they wander. Positioned throughout the farm, the viewers are invited into the artist’s playful yet foreboding world of hybrid creatures. Some of the pieces are repurposed from her photographic series, Linnaeus After Dark, a suite of small-scale prints of her sculptures in controlled, dark, minimal room settings. Reintroducing them outdoors with the chance elements of wind, sunlight, and other interventions by nature and in the context of the farm, creates an entirely different stage for interpreting her art.    

Claire Pentecost is an artist and writer who researches the living matters of the unified multi-dimensional being that animates the critical zone of our planet. Pentecost’s work is driven by research and inspired by questions of form. She advocates for the role of the amateur in the production and interpretation of knowledge, while a longstanding interest in nature and artificiality predicates her recent responses to anthropogenic climate change. Her soil-erg project considered the material of soil as the basis for a new economic system.

She is a founding member of Deep Time Chicago, a collective exploring cultural change in response to ecological crisis, and the Anthropocene Commons, an international research network. Pentecost has exhibited work at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany; 13th Istanbul Biennial; White Chapel Gallery, London; 3rd Mongolian Land Art Biennial; Sursock Museum, Beirut; Times Museum; Guangzhou; MCA Chicago; MSU Broad Museum; Museum of Contemporary Photography; DePaul Art Museum; Corcoran Museum; Milwaukee Art Museum; Transmediale 05; and many others. She is represented by Higher Pictures Generation, New York, and is Professor Emeritus at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she taught for 25 years. With Brian Holmes she directs Watershed Art&Ecology, an experimental cultural space in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago.

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