Mark Lombardi: Global Networks

Milwaukee Art Museum Exhibits Mark Lombardi's "Global Networks"
January 13-April 10

"Artist Connects the Power Brokers, the Money and the World"
"Delicate Spider Webs of Scandal" - NY Times

The Milwaukee Art Museum features the groundbreaking work of Brooklyn artist Mark Lombardi (1951-2000) January 13 - April 10, 2005. Mark Lombardi: Global Networks, the first retrospective of the artist's influential work, includes 24 of Lombardi's drawings-a new type of history painting. The retrospective, organized by Independent Curators International (ICI), presents Lombardi's visual narratives that map the way money flows in our trans-national economy. Because of its focus on often illegal and clandestine financial transactions, Lombardi's work attains almost prophetic significance in today's political and cultural climate. Examples of Lombardi's works include Oliver North, Lake Resources of Panama, and the Iran-Contra Operation, ca. 1984-86 and George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens, ca. 1979-90.

Artist Mark Lombardi's listing in the Bush Body Count:
He was an accomplished conceptual artist who, while chatting on the phone with a banker friend about the Bush savings and loan scandal, started doodling a diagram and was inspired to create a complex series of drawings and sketches that charted the details of the scandal. According to the New York Times, "He was soon charting the complex matrices of personal and professional relationships, conflict of interest, malfeasance and fraud uncovered by investigations into the major financial and political scandals of the day; to keep facts and sources straight, he created a handwritten database that now includes around 12,000 3-by-5-inch cards."

On the evening of March 22, 2000, Mark Lombardi was found hanging in his loft, an apparent suicide.