Claire Pentecost is an artist/activist focusing on food, soil, and bio-engineering; and a professor of photography at SAIC (the School of the Art Institute of Chicago). For Proposal for a New American Agriculture, she placed a US flag in a composting bin in her basement in Chicago, removing and photographing it after worms had transformed most of it into soil.
One reading of this striking image: It points to the unsustainability and inevitable collapse of America’s corporate-dominated, anti-environmental economy and ecology, and the need to weave a new American fabric to fill this gap.
See also:
- Paula Calvo. 5 Questions: Claire Pentecost. F Newsmagazine (SAIC student publication), Jan 26, 2015.
- Jason Groves. Keystone Species. New Ecologies blog, Open Humanities Press, May 15, 2013.
- Timothy Norton. Notes on Pentecost’s paper “Of Waste and Work” at the Cultures of Energy 2nd Annual Spring Research Symposium, Rice University, Apr 21, 2013.
- Thom Donovan. 5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Claire Pentecost. Art21 magazine, Jan 31, 2012.
- Friday Connect: Agri-cultural. Sep 28, 2012.
- Holland Carter. Review of Claire Pentecost: ‘Interior Studies’. New York Times, Dec 2, 2010.
- Claire Pentecost. When Art Becomes Life: Artist-Researchers and Biotechnology. Published by the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, Jan 2007.
- Artist’s website, www.publicamateur.org.
Portland Flag Association 