A wonderful thing bubbled up from the deep blue sea this summer: an invitation for an ocean residency and artwork commission at Patina Maldives, an eco-resort with primary mission of functional sustainability and an art collection that includes a commissioned Skyscape architecture by renowned artist James Turrell. The Maldives is a place that has long been on my mind ever since I learned it was the lowest lying country on earth and would be ‘ground zero’ for sea level rise from climate change. The Maldives is an island nation of 1,190 coral islands, with 80% of them standing less than 1 meter above sea level. Maldives is also the home of a most inspirational person, Mohammed Nasheed, the man who spearheaded the first democratic election in the Maldives after 3 decades of a despotic ruler, and was instrumental in forging the first-ever global climate treaty, the UN Paris Agreement in 2016. President Nasheed is the subject of a profound documentary titled The Island President (a must see.) As with nearly every spot on earth, the Maldives is

My art uses plastic recovered from beaches around the world to understand how our consumer society is transforming the ocean Pam Longobardi, Georgia State University I am obsessed with plastic objects. I harvest them from the ocean for the stories they hold and to mitigate their ability to harm. Each object has the potential to be a message from the sea – a poem, a cipher, a metaphor, a warning. My work collecting and photographing ocean plastic and turning it into art began with an epiphany in 2005, on a far-flung beach at the southern tip of the Big Island of Hawaii. At the edge of a black lava beach pounded by surf, I encountered multitudes upon multitudes of plastic objects that the angry ocean was vomiting onto the rocky shore. I could see that somehow, impossibly, humans had permeated the ocean with plastic waste. Its alien presence was so enormous that it had reached this most isolated point of land in the immense Pacific Ocean. I felt I was witness to an unspeakable crime against nature, and

It’s an immense honor to be chosen among 10 finalists for the 2022 COAL Art and Environment Prize in Paris! The winner of the COAL Prize benefits from an endowment of 10,000 euros allocated by the François Sommer Foundation and COAL, divided into an endowment and a production aid as part of a residency ran by the Museum of Hunting and Nature at the Domaine de Belval. JURY 2022 Bruno David, President of the National Museum of Natural HistoryMark Dion, ArtistCatherine Dobler, Founder of the LAccolade FoundationMarc Feldman, General Administrator of the Orchester National de BretagneChristine Germain-Donnat, Director of the Museum of Hunting and NatureHélène Guenin, Director of MAMAC, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in NiceElsa Guillaume, Artist, Winner of the 2015 Ocean COAL PrizeOlivier Lerude, Senior Official for Sustainable Development at the Ministry of CultureLéo Marin, Director of Galerie Eric Mouchet and Curator of The Possible IslandAnne-Marie Melster, Co-founder and Managing Director of ARTPORT_making wavesCharlotte Meunier, President of the Nature Reserves of FranceRomain Troublé, Managing Director of the Tara Ocean Foundation.

ORDER AT FALL LINE PRESS OR ORDER HERE FOR SIGNED COPIES The books are being printed and bound and will soon be en route to Fall Line in Atlanta, due to arrive in early December! You may order the book from either link above. Ocean Gleaning tracks the 17+ years of my art and research around the world through the Drifters Project.  Traveling on major expeditions or just walking on the beach, I hunt for and remove plastics that have been tossed about on a long journey through ocean ecosystems.  This is my story. The book documents my journey to remote and difficult to reach places around the world where plastic has been accumulating.  Powerful artifacts enter into the Drifters Archive  collection of tens of thousands.  The book reveals portraits of a sample of 100 specimens of striking objects harvested from the sea, these are objects once utilitarian that have been changed by their drifting voyages and come back as messages from the ocean. The book also contains a section of forensic site photographs from around the world; 

Longobardi is the recipient of the Margie E. West Prize, an annual prize given to an esteemed alumni from the Lamar Dodd School of Art, and was invited to create a new exhibition for the Marjorie E. West Gallery. The Flat Earth Society: a Visitation October 14 – November 18, 2021Marjorie E West Gallery, University of GeorgiaClimate change and mass extinction are undeniably real and visible to all yet so many heads are still in the sand while the world burns, melts, weeps and dries up. In this way, I am reminded of the infamous ‘Flat Earth Society’, a mid-19th c. re-invention based on archaic beliefs that somehow still hold weight in some circles of contemporary society.These paintings are a visitation from a farther future of imagined beautiful disasters.  Storms unfold, release energies, dissipate and reform, moving matter in spectacular cataclysms.  The grand narratives of human conquest are a story of the past.  That ship has sailed. How we will transform?  A future for ourselves is constantly being written.  By a mother for her elephant child. By an

My 2017 work has been acquired for Boston Consulting Group’s significant art collection. It’s an honor to be part of this meaningful collection of artwork. The selection criteria for this acquisition was that the work be of activist artists. This work is constructed of cigarette lighters that were collected from Laysan albatross nests on Midway Atoll by Oceanic Society volunteers. It highlights the end point and destructive futility of ‘disposable’ plastic.

I was commissioned to create a very large scale permanent wall installation for the new 8 West complex in Atlanta. The work measured 12 feet in height and 8 feet wide and was installed in a wall niche in the entrance atrium. The piece is visible from the 3rd Street entrance. ARCHAEOLOGY OF DESIRE, 2020 This artwork contains 627 pieces of derelict ocean plastic retrieved from remote beaches, sea caves and coastal zones around the world, including Hawaii, Alaska, Costa Rica, California, Greece, Indonesia, Belize, Panama, Alabama and Georgia.  Plastic is an invented substance that will never be absorbed back into the elemental matter of nature.  It will be present in our future geologic layers as a marker of both human ingenuity and appetites.  Many objects are recognizable and many are not, but they are all messages providing information from their journey through the living ocean world.  Shark bites are visible; coral, barnacles and bryozoans can be seen growing on it.  Also recognizable are the many forms of human desire for things.

Onar (repair the dream), 2020 video projection with stereo sound; survival rescue blankets; wire, metal screen, LED lighting, glass, minerals, crystals, mirror, salt. During the Covid pandemic quarantine of 2020, I was invited to participate in the Atlanta Contemporary’s 20 year anniversary show of the Artist Studio Program, curated by Daricia Delmarr and Kristin Cahill. I will complete two new site specific installation works, for Chute Space (former coal burning underground cement bunker) and Sliver Space. The first iteration was done for Chute Space. The video for this work was filmed on a deserted beach in summer 2019 on a remote part of Kefalonia, Greece, the island that has support Drifters Project research for many years.  The concept evolved from my work on the island of Lesvos, with some of the 600,000+ refugees that have migrated there.  Within the mountains of life-vests that are now a permanent landscape of that island, there were also gold survival rescue blankets, which I have been utilizing as material for the past several years.  Thin, cheap and plastic, they are critical

I am honored deeply to have my work “Ghosts of Consumption (for Piet M.)” on view in an installation of works from Crystal Bridges’ permanent collection alongside the great artists Louise Nevelson, Lynda Benglis, Ruth Asawa and Alma Thomas. This iteration exhibition was on view in the Contemporary Galleries from August 29, 2019 – October 5, 2020.

Five Points Journal of Art and Literature, the award-winning literary magazine of Atlanta and Georgia State University, has published a portfolio of my ‘Prophetic Object’ photographic pieces in the Summer 2019 edition.  The portfolio consists of full-color reproductions of 8 of my large-scale photographic works.  Randy Malamud, Regent’s Professor of English, wrote a moving essay to accompany the works, and one of my photographs of a rare ‘plastiglomerate’ from Hawaii was used as the journal cover.  You can download the portfolio by clicking here. Essay by Randy Malamud The sea has long been an inspiration for art, with its powerful colors and vast energies; its weathers, and winds, its waters containing marine creatures of all shapes and sizes. With visions of adventure and profit, people have always come to visit, live, and work by the seashores, continuing from beaches and ports out onto the oceans themselves. Along with travelers, commercial shippers, and aquatic harvesters whose business sends them to sea, the water attracts bathers and swimmers, subsistence fishers, artists, sailors, philosophers and dreamers who come to stare

CAN’T YOU SEA? | OCEAN PLASTIC ARTIFACTS June 15 – September 8, 2019 Newly renovated Franklin G. Burroughs Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum opens a large exhibition presenting works by six artists: Arturo Durand, Aurora Robson, Pam Longobardi, Dianna Cohen and more. http://myrtlebeachartmuseum.org/cant-you-sea-ocean-plastic-artifacts/ Lecture Series http://myrtlebeachartmuseum.org/planet-or-plastic Press Charleston Post and Courier https://www.postandcourier.com/features/arts_and_travel/ghosts-of-our-consumption WBTW TV News

Update: After The Clemente premier, Anthropocene Island travelled to Pratt Institute’s Dekalb Gallery in September 2019. Here is an except from a review of the show in Art511 by Terra Keck: “I carried that dread to the work of Pam Longobardi, who I felt held it with me. If Rupps work shoves viewers off the cliff of existential dread, Longobardi is the net that catches them. “Night Flag of Lesvos” is a patchwork abstract tapestry made of recovered life vests from migrants and refugees on the coast of Lesvos, Greece. Working through her platform Drifters Project, she works with refugees on site to create works of art to help generate income for the social and economic well-being of the islands inhabitants. In addition to donating her profits, Longobardi has disrupted the ever increasing flow of plastic into the ocean by collecting these life vests to create these works. This plastic carried children to safety and held families together afloat the Aegean sea, and now it continues to reinforce the meaning of a community’s power over adversity. In

2018 was busy: I exhibited large-scale installations at the Telfair Museum’s Jepson Center in Savannah, the CDC’s David J. Sencer Museum in Atlanta, and at Momentum Gallery in Asheville, NC and a window vitrine installation at The Great Highway in San Francisco. New works were created for the Telfair’s Contemporary Spotlight exhibition, the “Night Flag of Lesvos” and the “Anthropocene Time Capsule (Tybee Island)”.  My work was installed in 3 locations throughout the museum: the Grand Stairway landing; within the “Complex Uncertainties” exhibition, and in the theater, where the “Giant Sea Cave Excavation” was screened daily. For Momentum Gallery, I created new devalued currency collages of the “Islands of Refuge” series. In my old neighborhood in San Francisco, the Outer Sunset, is a cool little gallery called The Great Highway.  My window vitrine installation looked out on my old street Lawton.  We did a forensic beach cleaning with a small devoted group of surfers, life guards and neighborhood locals. Finally, the CDC Museum commissioned new work to feature within a show on the refugee crisis titled “The Refugee

The oddly-shaped domed islands of Palau, a sovereign island nation of Micronesia, are living fossils ~ the uplifted remains of ancient coral beds that rise above sea level to become habitat, ark and home to a vast array of creatures and people, including some of the most beautiful humans I have ever met. Palau is part of Micronesia in the western Pacific Ocean, east of Philippines and northeast of Indonesia, a 340 island strand highlighted by the spectacular cluster known as the Rock Islands, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  It was here in the State of Koror that Oceanic Society, Mission Blue, Plastic Pollution Coalition, Heirs to Our Oceans and Drifters Project collaboratively staged a 10-day expedition and forum focused on plastic pollution.The health of its underwater environment is visible in stunning abundance and biodiversity, and it feels even more heart-achingly beautiful in the knowledge that much of the ocean world once was like this.  The fossil coral Rock Islands are a dry-land mirror of the underwater coral gardens.  Often they are rimmed by caves of extraordinary

My newest exhibition has opened at Hathaway Contemporary Gallery in Atlanta, GA, the culmination of the past year’s studio and research trips to Lesvos and Kefalonia, Greece, Wales and Indonesia.  This work addresses the vast environmental and geopolitical forces re-ordering the world as we have known it through the traceable singularity that is oceanic plastic.  As a universal material of contemporary global culture, plastic endures in the environment such that all plastic ever created still exists.  My most recent work engages the refugees and citizens on the island of Lesvos, the small Aegean island that has received nearly 600,000 refugees on its shores.  I began work in Lesvos in a collaboration with both refugees in several camps and the citizens of the island whose lives have also been transformed in May of 2016, described here.  Lesvos: Heartbreak and joy in equal measure. I returned in December of 2016.  To begin the work envisioned, the first thing we needed upon arrival was to secure life vests from the vast landfill in the north island.  I contacted my friend Thanasis

A golden light matches the wonderful golden smell that envelopes the nose upon entering the Balinese taxi: it is the pungent shavings of coconut that are part of the small baskets of flowers and symbolic items laid daily as offerings of the nature-based Balinese Hinduism. This beautiful daily ritual is evidenced everywhere: on the street, on pathways, the beach, roadside altars and even in the taxi dashboards.  A place of deep spiritual connections to the natural world, Bali was the launching port of our 10-day Oceanic Society/Drifters Project/Plastic Pollution Coalition expedition from Bali to Komodo and back, and my 2nd trip was even more magical than my first in 2014. Our crew was a dedicated team of international experts on plastic pollution:  artists, scientists, activists, world-class photographers, philanthropists and explorers, joined by Indonesian counterparts, naturalists and conservation specialists.  Prior to our launch, we laid important groundwork in a series of meetings with local organizations from Bali and nearby islands:  Bye Bye Plastic Bag Bali, Diet Kantong Plastic, and the Coral Triangle Center. To my great joy, Amir

When we submitted a proposal to speak about Plastic Free Island at the World Islands Conference of ISISA (the International Small Island Studies Association) on the island of Lesvos over two years ago, ironically themed “Island Utopias”, there were none of the nearly 500,000 refugees that eventually thronged the shores of that Greek island just 6 miles offshore from Turkey in the Aegean Sea.  An island of immense beauty, home of the legendary first poet Sappho of millennia past and current home to a thriving lesbian enclave, Lesvos became the unlikely ground zero for the first large climate refugee event in the changed world of today. It is critical to understand the refugee crisis as first and foremost a climate crisis.  Prolonged drought in Syria forced hundreds of 1000s of people from the countryside to the overcrowded cities that fueled unrest and sparked a civil war.  These desperate masses took to all manner of floating plastic vessels, severely overloaded by the smugglers, and plunged toward the welcoming shores of Greece, a country long known for its openness and hospitality,

On the 5th year of Drifters Project’s presence and action in Kefalonia, we were given a major exhibition at the Goulandris Museum of Natural History in Athens, Greece~!  The exhibition opened in May 2015, and has just been extended for a second time through May 2016!  The museum is a vast, classical Victorian natural history museum of extensive specimens and fantastic dioramas, founded by the visionary Mrs. Goulandris, botanical illustrator of the flora of Greece, and has a massive contemporary addition that houses the Gaia Center, a vast space dedicated to the changing face of the planet. This is where Dianna Cohen and I installed our art exhibition, along with four photographers we invited.  Also invited were scientists of the Hellenic Marine Research Center and Marlisco, both organizations dedicated to researching marine plastic pollution in Greece and Europe. The 45 ft. long Ouroboros made last year for the Ionion Center exhibition traveled to Athens and I unfurled and reconfigured it as Post-Ouroboros (death by plastic), stretched out as a full-length ‘skin’ over the Gaia Center grand hall, echoing the taxidermied

Dropping into Belize City, the once capital of the tiny island nation of Belize, you feel strangely a little like being in Venice where vaporetti, or water taxis, are the primary mode of transport. So too for Belize, except there are also plenty of cars on the mainland, but none at all on the 2 miniature islands or cayes that were my home and worksite for the next 15 days. Another similarity is the general feeling of decrepitude, not as obvious in Venice unless you look closely, visit regularly or know people there, but magnified by 1000 in Belize City. And the shared feeling of being on the brink: of climate change, plastic invasion, and economic crisis. But Belize also harbors a lot of hope, and a small army of soulful people working to make change in a desperate situation. A country of natural wonders beyond compare, it is also, like any low-lying island or coast, a place on the brink. Within 24 hours, I was transported from the Atlanta airport to the tiny pinprick of Blackbird

March 26-27 /  Atlanta / GSU + CDC Museum In an unprecedented gathering, 35+ of the top national and local scientists, artists, activists and industry leaders present 2 full days of the newest scientific discoveries and creative disruption to the plastic pollution crisis~ Drifters Project, in collaboration with the CDC Museum, GSU, and Plastic Pollution Coalition, host this major event with in-depth panel sessions, films, presentations, popup exhibition and GYRE :  The Plastic Ocean exhibition currently on view at the CDC Museum! FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC SCHEDULE OF EVENTS + REGISTRATION:  March 26   +   March 27 MEDIA and PRESS COVERAGE: articles here + additional images here WEBSITE:  https://artdesign.gsu.edu/2021/05/03/2015-welch-symposium-plastic-gyre-artists-scientists-and-activists-respond/ Our official City of Atlanta Proclamation:  March 27 is Plastic Reduction Atlanta Day in perpetuity~

2014 marked the start of a new adventure:  I am the official Artist-In-Naure with Oceanic Society!  Founded in 1969, Oceanic Society is the oldest ocean conservation non-profit in America, focused on using the experience of travel in nature as a tool to deepen the connections between people and the natural world.  Their progressive leadership has introduced two initiatives in 2014: to address plastic pollution and to promote art as a conservation tool.  My first trip as Artist-In-Residence was co-leading the 10-day Bali to Komodo expedition on the live-aboard schooner Sea Safari VII with naturalist and Oceanic’s Director of International Travel and Sustainability Wayne Sentman.  My role as ‘Plastic Interpreter’ meant that, given the plastic plague in Indonesia, like most island nations, my work was cut out for me.                           Our 10 day voyage took us to remote large and tiny islands sprinkled between Bali and Komodo:  Lombok, Moyo, Gili, Banta, Satonda. We usually spent 5-6 hours in the water each day, snorkeling through the underwater marvels that are Indonesia. The fellow voyagers

I was honored to be invited by Carl Safina to write for his National Geographic’s NewsWatch page, published here, about my experiences in Armila, Panama with the beautiful Guna women artists there.  Here is my original text: THE MIRROR OF ARMILA, Pam Longobardi 6/17/14 There are no mirrors in Armila.  As a culture, the Guna are less concerned with themselves than they are with their families, friends and community.  When you live in Armila, you see yourself only as a reflection in the faces of the beautiful smiling people of this town.  Armila is in extremely remote southern Panama’s Caribbean coast, just a stone’s throw from Columbia, and is one of the most active leatherback sea turtle nesting areas in the world.  During my week in May 2014, there averaged 60-70 nesting turtles each night.  But the omnipresent mirror I encountered was the mirror of contemporary global culture, the overwhelming amount of plastic on their beach. Armila is only accessible only by boat, without public utilities or waste management. Ocean currents are quite fierce along this coast, with overhead