The Dodd Galleries at the University of Georgia is delighted to announce the opening of The Flat Earth Society: A Visitation, an exhibition of paintings by Pam Longobardi. Longobardi is the second recipient of the Margie E West Prize, an annual prize given to an esteemed alumni from the Lamar Dodd School of Art, inviting the artist to create a new exhibition for the Marjorie Eichenlaub West Gallery. In The Flat Earth Society, Longobardi presents a selection of recent paintings imagining beautiful disasters in distant, post-historic futures that will be on display from October 14 to November 18. She will be lecturing on her work on November 10th at 5:30pm in Auditorium S151. 

In her practice, often incorporating modalities of forensic and archaeological research, Longobardi investigates the problematic psychological relationship between humans and the natural world while simultaneously suggesting an interconnected fate. Her current paintings use the landscape genre to warn of untold changes, exploring the imaginary and near-real. She states, “I view the paintings as an antidote to the plastic work, but still wholly part of the Drifters Project.” A project in which she has transformed oceanic plastic debris, collected independently by Longobardi and as part of collaborative cleanup projects, into installations and public artworks whose ephemerality recalls the transient drift of their materials in situ. Of her paintings, Longobardi continues, “They are visualizations of vast forces of collision between natural processes (such as chemical patination of copper) and industrial, human-made products (like plastics, acrylics, resin, and oils) that are happening around the world, all shrunken to the manageable scale of a painting space. Through these works, I’m able to control the outcome and nature always comes out on top: the sun will come out, rainbows will form, and there will be another day. This practice helps me manage my emotionally and physically difficult work with plastic.” Incorporating myriad media, Longobardi's practice seeks to engage an urgent, emotional awareness of the environment and humanity’s place within it. 

Longobardi received her BFA in 1981 from the Lamar Dodd School of Art and her MFA from Montana State University. She has held recent solo exhibitions at Momentum Gallery, Asheville, NC; Telfair Museum Jepson Center, Savannah, GA; and a recent performance on the steps of City Hall, Poitiers, France. Her work is held in numerous public collections including High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, TN; Institut d’Estudis Nord-americans, Barcelona, Spain; Pratt Institute, New York, NY; and Miami Metropolitan Museum, Coral Gables, FL. Longobardi currently lives and works in Atlanta, GA as Regents’ Professor and Distinguished Professor of Art at Georgia State University.

The Lamar Dodd School of Art is grateful for the support for our programming and exhibitions in the Marjorie Eichenlaub West Gallery, which is supported by the Marjorie Eichenlaub West Gallery Endowment Fund. Margie’s contributions to the arts will be part of her lasting legacy. She will always be remembered as a voracious collector with a keen eye and unbridled passion for the arts.  

Margie served on the boards of The High Museum, the Georgia Museum of Art, and was a long-time member of The Forward Arts Foundation and a founding member of the Ceramic Circle of Atlanta. Her love of the arts was shared and passed down to her family, as her granddaughters attended Lamar Dodd School of Art.