Longobardi named one of 4 finalists for the prestigious $50,000 Hudgens Prize!
The finalists were chosen from a pool of 370 applicants by Doryun Chong, associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Toby Kamps, chief curator of the Menil Collection in Houston; and Heather Pesanti, senior curator at AMOA/Arthouse in Austin and until recently curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York.
The $50,000 Hudgens Prize will be awarded by the jury based on studio visits and the works exhibited in the Hudgens Prize Finalists’ Exhibition. The winner will be announced on August 10.
Longobardi, an Atlanta resident, has had over 40 solo exhibitions and 65 group exhibitions in galleries and museums in the US, China, Italy, Spain, Finland, Poland, Japan, Germany, Greece and Monaco. Her artworks are in numerous collections both public and private.
A recipient of many awards, Longobardi is Professor of Art at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia and created the Drifters Project in 2006, an ongoing environmental art intervention involving photography and installation focusing on the cultural artifact of contemporary life, the plastic object, and its impact on the global ocean.
She exhibited this work in Beijing at NY ARTS/Beijing during the 2008 Olympics and at ARTLIFEfortheworld in Venice for the 2009 Venice Biennale ARTE VISIVI collateral exhibitions. Edizione CHARTA (Milan, NY) published a book on her project titled “Drifters: Plastics, Pollution and Personhood” in 2010.
Recent exhibitions include Voyages on an Uncanny Sea at Gallery Diet in Miami, a commission of new work for Oceanomania at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, curated by Mark Dion, Sarina Basta and Cristiano Raimondi, and at Savvy Contemporary in Berlin.
Sponsored by the Anchorage Museum, Alaska Sea Life Center and the Smithsonian Institution, Longobardi is lead artist on the 2013 GYRE expedition, a scientific/artistic research project by sea along Alaska’s remote shores. The expedition will be presented in a documentary film by Emmy-nominated JJ Kelley of National Geographic, and the exhibition, with support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rauschenberg Foundation, will be documented in a book published by the Anchorage Museum.
In an ongoing long-term project in conjunction with the Ionion Center for Art and Culture, Drifters Project 2013 returns for its third year to the island of Kefalonia for cave and near shore excavation and collection, in collaboration with the Greek Naval Academy of the Ionian Islands and an archaeologic project called A.Sho.re. A feature-length documentary is in progress with projected release in 2014.
Artist’s Statement: “I am a conceptual artist with a strong affinity to materials and process. Collectively, both these aspects of my practice explore the Anthropocene, the new geologic era dominated by humans. Plastic objects are the cultural archaeology of our time. These are objects with unintended consequences that become transformed as they leave the quotidian world and collide with nature to be mutated, transported and regurgitated out of the shifting oceans. I have made scores of interventions, cleaning beaches and making collections from all over the world, removing thousands of pounds of material from the natural environment and re-situating it in exhibition context for examination.”
Pam Longobardi’s “Ghosts of Consumption,” found ocean plastic, steel pins and silicone.
