American artist
Greg Lindquist (born May 9, 1979) is an American artist, painter and sculptor based in New York City.
Early life and education.
Early life and family history.
Greg Lindquist was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, to David Lindquist, an ichthyologist and marine biology professor at University of North Carolina Wilmington, and Donna Bishop Lindquist, an English grade school teacher. When Lindquist was 9, he lived in Salzburg, Austria with his family as his father conducted research for a Fulbright Grant in which he studied the feeding habits of the Blennius fish. Lindquist attended the 84th birthday party of the Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz outside of Vienna, and was put to work with the other children washing dishes at the bar. With his family, he also visited several of the sites of Nazi Concentration Camps, including Dachau and Mauthausen, a history that haunted him for decades to come and became the subject of his first mature body of work in undergrad. His mother's father, Bill Bishop, a B-17 ball turret gunner in a World War II, was gunned down over Holland on a mission to bomb Berlin on March 6, 1944 at 18 years-old and was quickly forced to decide upon finding that his crew had bailed whether to bail and be captured, or try to land the plane in ally territory. He parachuted, was captured, and remained in Stalag Luft IV POW camp for a year.
High School Education and Formative Experience.
Lindquist graduated from Emsley A. Laney High School in 1997. During High School, Lindquist was involved in the counter-culture of the local punk and hardcore scene, where he discovered and created 'zines and played in the hardcore band Lapseed Soul. He didn't become serious about art until his senior year when he met Jessica Hess, who was in his brother Bill Lindquist's grade. Hess's technical skill with prismacolor and oil paint was an inspiration for Lindquist, and the summer before college he took oil painting lesson's from her instructor while she was at Governor's School. They together explored through 35mm film photography the post-industrial districts of Wilmington, North Carolina, which in the late 1990s was largely a ghost town with the exception of the record store CD Alley and a few clubs. This would prove to be a formative experience for both of their mature bodies of work, which focused on the post-industrial urban landscape and graffiti.
Education.
Lindquist studied art and English at North Carolina State University, and attended graduate school in New York at Pratt Institute, earning an MFA in painting and masters in art history. He also was a studio participant at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (ISP).
During graduate school, Lindquist was a research intern at the Museum of Modern Art, writing wall labels for the permanent collection including Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World, as well as paintings by Arshile Gorky and Willem DeKooning. He also worked as an assistant for the artist Ryan McGinness.
Work.
Lindquist's early work addressed landscape as a memorial, confronting the gentrification of the deindustrialized Brooklyn waterfronts of Williamsburg and Red Hook in late capitalism. The paintings took the shape of elongated horizons, metallic surfaces describing sky, water, and graffiti. The light of these industrialscapes often was a glowing twilight, and the work was often compared to the British-American painter Rackstraw Downes. Painter and writer Stephen Westfall summarizes the early work, "Lindquist's melancholy marks him as a Romantic. When I look at his work, I see layered influences bouncing back and forth across history: Morandi painting Friedrich painting Hopper." Addressing the entropic forces in architecture on a global scale, Lindquist traveled to Tbilisi, Georgia in 2009 to research decay from the Soviet Union era town Rustavi, which became the subject of the exhibition "Nonpasts" (2010). He also met Georgian artist Gio Sumbadze during this trip, with whom he'd collaborate for the next decade, such as "Frozen Moments, Architecture Speaks Back" in 2010.
The Dan River coal ash spill in 2014 has been the conceptual, visual, thematic, and political driver of his Smoke and Water project. Working in partnership with Working Films, he created an installation of paintings and murals from an image shared by a water keeper documenting ash swirling with river water. The work was completed collaboratively with the local art, ecology, and activist communities. Lindquist works with the guiding principle that art can facilitate social change, actively creating space for the possibility of mobilizing political action and reshaping common values. In 2015, he was Guest Critic for the November issue of The Brooklyn Rail and curated a concurrent show, Social Ecologies which focused on the intersections and ruptures between art and ecology.
Returning to NYC as a site of research, Lindquist has continued his engagement with community-centered, ecologically driven interventions through research on the Newtown Creek, a critically polluted waterway on the Brooklyn and Queens border. Working with the Newtown Creek Alliance, he has assisted with water quality collection and has reviewed EPA clean-up plans while serving on a technical data committee. He also co-organized an ongoing series of collaborative research events on a human-powered rowboat in the Newtown Creek's autonomous zone with up-close, site-specific fieldwork and painting.
One-person exhibitions and projects.
2017
2014
2009
2008
Group exhibitions.
2016
2012
2010
Bibliography.
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
References.
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