Ada Pinkston (b. 1983, New York, USA)
Ada Pinkston is an African-American multimedia artist, educator, and cultural organizer. Her art explores the intersection of imagined histories and sociopolitical realities on our bodies, using monoprint, performance, video, and collage. Inter-subjective exchanges are the primary substrate of her work.
Over the years, her work has been featured at a variety of spaces, including The Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building, The Walters Art Museum, The Peale Museum, Transmodern Performance Festival, P.S.1, The New Museum, Light City Baltimore, and the streets of Berlin. She is a Halcyon Arts Lab Fellow (2018), Baker Artist award semifinalist (2016); a recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Grit Fund Grant in Visual Arts, administered by The Contemporary (2017); and a Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Ruby’s Project Grant in Visual Arts in (2017). In addition to her studio practice, she is a co-founder of the LabBodies Performance Art Laboratory in Baltimore, Maryland. She is currently a lecturer in Art Education at Towson University.
The photographs from Ada Pinkston’s Landmarked series (2018) feature the artist performing on vacant plinths where Confederate monuments previously stood in Baltimore, USA. Through this work, Pinkston explores new ways of activating these empty spaces that she views as metaphors of the silences that exist in history.