Contemporary Spotlight: Pam Longobardi

Telfair Museums’ Contemporary Spotlight series is an artist-centered exhibition platform that highlights contemporary art by nationally-emerging artists through small exhibitions and featured loans. Artists are encouraged to respond to place and to reflect the issues of our time.

This presentation of Longobardi’s work takes form in various spaces in the Jepson Center: the Neises Auditorium, the Third Floor Landing space, and the ongoing exhibition Complex Uncertainties: Artists in Postwar America.

In 2006, after discovering mountainous piles of plastic debris the Pacific Ocean was depositing on the remote shores of Hawaii, Longobardi began collecting and utilizing this plastic as the primary material in her project called Drifters. Since then, she has 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 repurposing it in her art. These collection missions are often done solo as part of her process. Longobardi approaches the sites as a forensic scientist, examining and documenting the deposition as it lay, collecting and identifying the evidence of the crime.

"I am an artist and an activist. I care that people know where my work comes from, that it has the message of environmental concerns. Plastic is ubiquitous. It never goes away. And yet these are also artifacts; they’re this strange material legacy that we’re leaving behind.”

— Pam Longobardi

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website