Gust

2025

sculpture, 18 min audio track
Driehaus museum, Chicago, IL

Jefferson Pinder's "Gust." Photo: Courtesy of Bob. (Robert Salazar and Robert Heischman)

Jefferson Pinder is one of 14 artists, all with Midwest connections, who have brought unexpected and sometimes haunting multimedia elements into this old home turned art museum. Pinder’s 18-minute track, which plays on a loop, includes an unsettling laugh that belongs to one of the first Black artists to be recorded, George Washington Johnson. It’s married with street noise from the Gilded Age.

Pinder’s work — which protrudes from the belly of the fireplace, as if the sound is traveling down the shaft — also brings his own perspective as a contemporary Black artist to this space.

“I do feel like it is a radical position to be placed in a historic home that you know you may not have been able to go through the front door of when it was created,” Pinder, 54, said. “If the architecture could speak, what kind of sounds would it make? What kind of histories are missing?”

Jefferson Pinder