Robert Longo, Fall 2017 Zabar Visiting Artist

The Hunter College Department of Art and Art History is pleased to announce a public lecture by Robert Longo as part of the Fall 2017 Judith Zabar Visiting Artist Series, Wednesday, October 18, 2017, 7:00 pm at Hunter's Roosevelt House, 47-49 East 65th St in Manhattan.

Robert Longo is a New York-based artist, filmmaker, and musician. Born in 1953, Longo moved to New York in 1977, and that same year, was one of the five artists included in the now legendary exhibition "Pictures," curated by Douglas Crimp at Artists Space. "Pictures" was the first exhibition to present the work of a group of younger artists turning away from Minimal and Conceptual Art toward image-making practices inspired by newspapers, advertisements, film, and television. Over the next decade, Longo became a leading protagonist of what came to be known as the “Pictures Generation,” working in drawing, photography, painting, sculpture, performance, and film to create works that posed provocative critiques of the anaesthetizing and seductive effects of capitalism, mediatized wars, and the cult of history in the US. Since the 1990s, Longo has been pushing the limits of the charcoal medium, producing monumental, hyper-real charcoal on paper drawings on a scale that competes with that of sculpture.

Robert Longo has been represented by Metro Pictures—the first New York commercial gallery to champion the Pictures Generation artists—since they opened in 1980. His work is currently featured in the exhibition “Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo,” on view at the Brooklyn Museum from September 8, 2017 through January 7, 2018. In conjunction with his residency as a Zabar Visiting Artist, he has installed "American Bridge Project" on Hunter College's main campus on East 68th Street. The public work spreads images taken from his large- scale charcoal drawings--of the First Amendment to the Constitution and the American flag--across Lexington Avenue on Hunter's iconic sky bridges. "American Bridge Project" is curated by Jill Brienza with Sarah Watson, and is on view through December 1, 2017.