Aislinn Pentecost-Farren
Aislinn Pentecost-Farren is an artist, a curator, and a public historian who creates interdisciplinary interpretive projects with museums, parks, and heritage sites.
Biography
Over the past 10 years, Aislinn Pentecost-Farren has led dozens of interdisciplinary projects that convene communities and publics to create collaborative, site-specific projects at historic places and green spaces. She takes artifacts, collections, buildings, and landscapes as the starting point for interpretation, sculpture, publications, and public programing.
Pentecost-Farren also works to bring current environmental issues into conversation with art, culture, and history. She created an interactive public installation about water futures for the 2012 Hidden City Philadelphia Festival. She worked with Bartram’s Garden from 2015 to 2017, to create a series of art projects revealing urgent yet overlooked histories, including the Black history of the garden, and commissions from other artists. Additionally, Pentecost-Farren curated a two-year series of projects in Philadelphia’s formerly industrial Northeast Philadelphia neighborhoods for the Riverfront North Partnership, including a river oral history project printed on pizza boxes, a lantern parade celebrating the maritime underground railroad, and an art-centered riverside field trip for middle-schoolers.
Her current body of work identifies the history of the climate crisis in sites and objects from the origins of the catastrophe. She helped Lowell Mills National Historical Park integrate climate change history into a field trip curriculum; wrote a prototype climate tour for the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and was a 2023 fellow at Stenton House in Philadelphia, to research the connections between indigenous and climate histories at that site.
Experience
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Pentecost-Farren has spent six years as project manager and consultant for Mural Arts Philadelphia.
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Her partners include Eastern State Penitentiary, the National Museum of American Jewish History, Mural Arts Philadelphia, Philadelphia Parks and Recreation, Bartram’s Garden, Hidden City Philadelphia, Glen Foerd on the Delaware, Philadelphia Lazaretto, Fairmount Park Conservancy, and the Riverfront North Partnership in Philadelphia, as well as the Arts Council of Wales, U.K.; Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, North Carolina; and Elsewhere Living Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina.
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Pentecost-Farren holds an MFA and a Master of Science in Historic Preservation from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.