Mark Lombardi

<p>In October 1999, I saw a drawing by Mark Lombardi in an exhibition called “Monumental Drawings” at Exit Art, New York. I was arrested by the clarity of his “hand-drawn,” and slightly academic, form of corporate chart. It also recalled a map illustrating the flight paths of a global airline. I had recently moved from Rome to join P.S.1 as senior curator, and I was having a difficult time with maps and physical orientation in and through the five boroughs of New York.</p> <p>P.S.1 had just merged with MoMA, and Alanna Heiss, Klaus Biesenbach, and I decided late one night to propose to our colleagues at MoMA that a first collaboration with them might be to organize a group show that would open in early 2000 at P.S.1. We called it “Greater New York” from the name of a map that I had lying on a desk. I proposed Lombardi for inclusion and went to visit him at his studio in Brooklyn, where we began an intense exchange of ideas on art and the world—an alliance that ended abruptly when, on March 22, 2000, only a few weeks after the opening of that exhibition on February 27, he was found dead in his studio, and I was told he had committed suicide.</p> <p>The artist was born in 1951 in Syracuse, New York, where he studied art history and received a B.A. in 1974. After college, he moved to Texas as an artist-curator and then a librarian, where he began in late 1993 to research and collect information about financial scandals and crimes from news reports, books, and other documents. Lombardi was outraged by corruption and the abuse of power, and he believed in art as a political act of engagement. In the mid-1990s, his early charts became the focus of his mature signature drawings…</p>