Ocean Gleaning | Pam Longobardi

Pam Longobardi has channeled her lifelong love of the ocean into an artistic practice that transforms the mountains of plastic debris that wash up on beaches around the world. For more than 15 years Longobardi has utilized found ocean plastics as her primary source material arranging hundreds of plastic pieces into meticulous wall-mounted artworks or turning them into monumental floor-based sculptures. She refers to this body of work as the “Drifters Project.” Working collaboratively with communities around the globe Longobardi has cleaned beaches from Hawaii to Greece to Panama and dozens of locations in between removing tens of thousands of pounds of plastic from the environment and converting them into thought-provoking works of art that shed an unflinching light on the effects of global consumption on the natural world.

Longobardi is regents’ professor at the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design at Georgia State University in Atlanta. She was the recipient of the prestigious Hudgens Prize in 2013 and has exhibited her artwork in museums and galleries throughout the United States and globally. Longobardi is represented in public and private collections including the Maier Museum of Art Lynchburg Virginia; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art Bentonville Arkansas; and many others.