Artist Email: plongobardi@gsu.edu
Artist Statement
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 project following the world ocean currents. Her project Drifters documents and transforms oceanic plastic pollution into installations and photography. The work provides a visual statement about the vast amounts of plastic objects and their impact on the world’s most remote places. Longobardi’s work is framed within a conversation about globalism and conservation. Longobardi will be part of the Gyre expedition to the coastal areas of the Alaska and will create project-specific works for the exhibition.