Pamela Longobardi
Pam Longobardi’s parents were an ocean lifeguard and the Delaware state diving champion, connecting her from an early age to the water. She moved to Atlanta in 1970 and saw her neighborhood pond drained to build the high school she attended. Since then, she lived for varying time periods in Wyoming, Montana, California, and Tennessee, and worked as a firefighter and tree planter, a scientific illustrator and an aerial mapmaker, a waitress and a bartender, a collaborative printer and a color mixer. Her artwork involves painting, photography, and installation and addresses the psychological relationship of humans to the natural world. She has shown her artwork across the US and in Greece, Monaco, Germany, Finland, Slovakia, China, Japan, Italy, Spain, Belgium, and Poland. She currently lives and works in Atlanta and is Professor of Art at Georgia State University. Presently she drifts with her ongoing Drifters Project, following the world ocean currents. With the Drifters Project, she collects, documents and transforms oceanic plastic into installations and photography. The work provides a visual statement about the engine of global consumption and the vast amounts of plastic objects and their impact on the world’s most remote places and its creatures. Longobardi’s work is framed within a conversation about globalism and conservation. Longobardi participated in the 2013 GYRE expedition to remoste coastal areas of Alaska and will create project-specific works for the exhibition at the Anchorage Museum February 2014. Longobardi was featured in a National Geographic film on the GYRE expedition and her Drifters Project was featured in National Geographic magazine. Also in 2013, Longobardi created a site-specific installation for a special project of the Venice cultural association Ministero di Beni Culturali (MiBAC) and the Ministry of Culture of Rome for the 55th Venice Biennale on the Island of San Francesco del Deserto in the Venetian Lagoon. This work was over 45 feet long and made from hundreds of plastic water bottles, mirrors and a satellite dish that signaled an apology to St. Francis across the lagoon to the island of Burano. She recently exhibited photography in Seescape at George Adams Gallery in New York, and won the prestigious Hudgens Prize (2013), one of the largest single prizes given to an artist in North America. She has an ongoing collaboration supported by the Ionion Center for Art and Culture in Kefalonia, Greece.
American. Based in Atlanta, GA.
Available Works
Sappho's Mirror III, 2011
SCULPTURE
Artist: Pamela Longobardi
Dimensions: 96" x 50" x 4"
Materials: Found ocean plastic from Hawaii, Italy, and Costa Rica. Signed.
About: Sapphos Mirror is made of black plastic collected from Hawaii, Italy and Costa Rica. The title is a reference to the ancient Greek poet Sappho's work "If you are squeamish, do not prod the beach rubble." I finished the first of these black mirror just weeks before the Deep Water Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and so these works illuminate the dark nature of plastic and its link to oil, as plastic is made of oil.
Proceeds Benefit: 50% of the net proceeds from the sale of this sculpture will be donated to the Plastic Pollution Coalition and the Hawaii Wildlife Fund.
Price: $8,500 USD
(Price does not include shipping.)
For purchasing, high resolution images or other details, please contact plongobardi@gsu.edu
To learn more about Pamela, please visit www.PamLongobardi.com