Jody Pinto

"Two structures face each other. They are alike yet different. They are connected by a body-land exchange. It is a transfusion of rain through a sluice system. They are dependent upon each other for life. A second exchange occurs when the project is watered by hand. It is alive – it has thirst."

—Jody Pinto

Art Lot presents Body/Land Exchange, in partnership with moCa Cleveland on the occasion of the artist’s first retrospective, Jody Pinto: Body/Land. Drawing on her series of architectural sculptures from the late 1970s, Pinto constructed a pair of “living” structures connected by a weather-responsive trough system, each dependent on the other and their environment in a shared ecology of survival.

For over fifty years, Pinto has developed a radical body of work spanning sculpture, drawing, ephemeral outdoor installations, activism, and public art. Emerging during the Land art movement in the 1970s, she built sensorial, provisional works outdoors, often activated by weather conditions and visitors. In 1987, she completed the work for which she is best known: Fingerspan Bridge, a permanent fixture sited along a hiking trail in Wissahickon Valley Park, Philadelphia. Since the 1990s, Pinto has been commissioned as an artist on more than fifty international public projects including bridges, parks, train stations, waterfronts and gardens. Across these varied works, she explores the experience of passage, the performance of being in public, and the generative possibilities of collaboration and entropy.

In Pinto’s new outdoor sculpture Body/Land Exchange, two monolithic structures build on her Heart Chambers sculptures from 1978, sited at the ICA Philadelphia at UPenn and the Art Institute of Chicago. Working with students and using cinder blocks and metal duct work, the artist built structures to house fabric bundles containing red pigment. When it rained, the structures appeared to bleed from their metal channels, or “arteries,” as Pinto called them— an indication of living forces within. In her newest version, a ritual performance of watering also activates the work.

As founder of Women Organized Against Rape (WOAR) in 1973, Pinto played a foundational role in the feminist movement against sexual violence, channeling her experience into a sustained artistic inquiry that examines interdependent effects of oppression, corporeal violence, and environmental extraction. Driving this transdisciplinary practice is Pinto’s idea of “body/land,” a formulation that connects bodily and environmental systems such as veins and irrigation, hair and plant growth, and cycles of injury and healing.

— Marie Catalano, co-curator of Jody Pinto: Body/Land

Jody Pinto (b. 1942, New York, NY) lives and works in New York, NY. Her work was recently featured in Groundswell: Women of Land Art at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, TX (2023) and Underground at MoMA (2022-2023). Pinto’s work has been included in the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennale, and in exhibitions at Artpark, Lewiston, NY; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia; the New Museum, and the Queens Museum (both in NY). From 1971-74 she founded and directed Women Organized Against Rape (WOAR), the longest-operating rape crisis center in Philadelphia, PA. She has collaborated on over 50 public works including for bridges, gardens, parks, and transit systems and is the recipient of numerous awards and grants for this work, including the NEA Federal Design Achievement Award, A.I.A. Honor Award: National Design for Transportation Award, Art in Public Spaces and two National ASLA Design Honor Awards. Her extant public works include Fingerspan Bridge (1987) in Wissahickon Valley Park, Philadelphia PA, Tree of Life (1992) at Papago Park, Phoenix, the redesign of Santa Monica State Beach and Palisade Park in Los Angeles (2001), the Fort Lauderdale International Airport (2002), Land Buoy (2014) in Philadelphia, PA and the Rio del Rey Bridge in Phoenix, AZ. . Pinto received her BFA from Pennsylvania Academy for Fine Arts (PAFA) where she later taught for four decades.