Prairie Festival Artist Featured at Salina Art Center

Claire Pentecost: 2018 Prairie Festival Artist

Salina, Kan. (Sept. 24, 2018) The exhibition Claire Pentecost: 2018 Prairie Festival Artist is at the Salina Art Center Sept. 26 - Dec. 16, 2018 in downtown Salina.

Claire Pentecost, artist, activist, writer, and professor of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is The Land Institute’s 2018 Prairie Festival Artist. The Prairie Festival offers a unique opportunity to interact with some of the world’s most compelling authors, thinkers, artists, and advocates focused on agriculture, food, the environment, science, sustainability, and social and environmental justice.

According to the artist, “The motivation for my work is to learn about the world I live in, the world that hosts and sustains me, a world called earth. For this basic project, I think of myself as a public amateur, someone who consents to start with ‘I don't know’ and proceeds by learning things in public view, public so that we can put the process of learning itself in a space reserved for debating values, the discursive space we designate as art.”

Pentecost’s abiding interest in questioning our notions of the natural and the artificial informs her engagement with the issues surrounding genetically modified foods, agricultural practices, and the environment. Since 2011, her work has focussed on the subject of soil as the source of ecological diversity and its importance in maintaining an environment that can continue to sustain us.

Work from three of Pentecost’s recent projects are featured in Claire Pentecost: 2018 Prairie Festival Artist. The artist’s old friends and unloved others, an ongoing series of delicate silverpoint drawings, explores the symbiotic relationship between humans and the many, mostly microbial, life forms that live in and on our bodies and in healthy soil. Examples from Pentecost’s recent experiments with soil chromatography, a visual method of soil analysis, along with a piece from Proposal for a New American Agriculture are also included.

Salina Art Center exhibitions and programming are funded by Art Center donors, patrons, members, sponsors, area foundations, and grant programs of Salina Arts & Humanities, City of Salina. Admission to the Art Center is free and galleries are are open Wednesday – Saturday from 11-5 p.m. and Sunday 1-5 p.m.

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Founded in 1978, the Salina Art Center is a 501(c)3 creating exchanges among art, artists, and audiences that reveal life. Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, the Art Center's galleries, Art Center Cinema, and Warehouse are located in the heart of downtown Salina, KS. Learn more online at www.salinaartcenter.org. The Salina Art Center’s exhibitions and programs are funded by Art Center donors and members and the Salina Arts & Humanities Grants Program, the City of Salina.