Mark Lombardi (March 23, 1951 – March 22, 2000) was an American neo-conceptual artist who specialized in drawings that document alleged financial and political frauds by power brokers, and in general "the uses and abuses of power".
Education and early career Lombardi was born in the town of Manlius, New York, just outside Syracuse, New York. He majored in art history at Syracuse University, and graduated with a B.A in 1974. While still an undergraduate, Lombardi had a job as chief researcher for a 1973 art exhibit Teapot Dome to Watergate – a multimedia collage, all of whose elements focused on various US governmental scandals; it was motivated by the then-ongoing Watergate scandal. In 1975, James Harithas (the former director of the Syracusan Everson Museum) hired Lombardi to be an assistant curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas, where Harithas had become director. Lombardi worked there for approximately two years, until 1976. While in Houston, he also opened a small art gallery, "Square One". Then, he became a general reference librarian for the Fine Arts department in the Houston Public Library, started a regional artist archive, and wrote two books, one on the drug wars and another on the neglected and forgotten art genre of panoramas. During this time, Lombardi was also an abstract painter of no particular note; he pursued painting as a hobby during his actual career as an archivist and reference librarian.
Late career Six years before his death, Lombardi switched to link analysis pencil diagrams of crime and conspiracy networks that he would become best known for. In the early 1990s, he began researching the many scandals of the time, including the BCCI scandal, the Harken Energy scandal, and the Savings and Loan scandal. The thousands (roughly 14500) of index cards that he accumulated in the course of this research began to overwhelm his ability to deal with them, and to cope, Mark began assembling them into physical outlines, and then into hand-written diagrams. These were intended to be a tool, to provide focus to his work, but he "...soon decided that this method of combining text and image in a single field (called a drawing, diagram or flow chart, whichever you prefer) really worked for me in other ways as well." This decision was spurred, according to Lombardi, while he was talking with a friend about one of the participants in the Iran–Contra scandal, Adnan Khashoggi. Regarding this conversation, Lombardi wrote "I began taking notes, then sketching out a simple tree chart, showing the breakdown of Khashoggi's American holdings. Within days, I began making more of these charts, depicting other corporate networks I had researched. I was writing several pieces at the time and found the charts a useful, quick reference to the material at hand." Initially, as the subject of one of his manuscripts, the primary focus was on the drug wars, but because of Pete Brewton's January 1990 newspaper series about the Houston S&L scandal, in which Brewton alleged that the Bush family, CIA members, and Mafia members took part in a de facto conspiracy to steal vast sums of money, Lombardi shifted his emphasis to investigating the laundering of the stolen money. Lombardi divorced in October 1996, and moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn at the urging of his friend Fred Tomaselli. There, he participated in a group show at the Drawing Center, called Selections: Winter 1997, followed by two solo art shows: Silent Partners, shown in November 1998 at Pierogi 2000 in Brooklyn, and Vicious Circles, a work drawing upon Jonathan Kwitny's book of the same name dealing with Mafia involvement in the legitimate commercial markets, shown in 1999 at the Devon Golden Gallery in Chelsea. Mark was included in Versus IV - a Willoughby Sharp curated group effort juxtaposing five American artists (including John Drury, Neil Frankl, Alan Skarritt and Duff Schweninger in addition to Lombardi) with eight Europeans in Torino, Italy - also in 1998, where two of his drawings including "Neil Bush and Silverado #2" (1996) were printed in the accompanying catalogue. He also participated in another group show, Greater New York: New Art in New York Now in February 2000 at the P.S. 1 art gallery. In March 2000, on the day before his death, Lombardi moved all his work to Pierogi 2000. He then bolted his apartment from the inside and hanged himself, on the day before his birthday and three years after he had moved to Williamsburg.
Works
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