Lombardi's Web

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"It's an electrifying moment," says Frances Richard, who teaches at Barnard College and wrote one of the two catalog essays for the Global Networks exhibit. "You've just enjoyed your visual cake, airy and fragile and decoratively luscious, and then you're forced to eat it, to digest this heavy dose of economic, political, caustic, and complicated reference."

Lombardi began making his diagram-drawings in 1994, in the midst of the roaring '90s and well before Osama bin Laden had supplanted Saddam Hussein as America's favorite villain. The drawings coolly show the recurrent corruption and disturbing greed of advanced capitalism at work, usually centering on banking and investment scandals that are normally cursorily skimmed in newspaper business sections. Taken as a group, Lombardi's drawings represent a powerful critique of the dysfunctions of the global economy and economic laissez-faire of the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush regimes. As the capital piled up and the '90s boomed all around him, Lombardi refused to let white-collar criminals off the hook.

Lombardi based his information-overloaded drawings on meticulous research he conducted using mostly public records available at local libraries. He discovered his talent for research when he was a college undergraduate. While studying at Syracuse University, Lombardi worked as chief researcher for the Everson Museum at Syracuse's 1973 Teapot Dome to Watergate show. He later moved to Houston, a location that would further influence the direction his art would later take. Living in the heart of oil country and the epicenter for the savings and loan scandals exposed in the late 1980s by Houston journalist Pete Brewton informed the artwork that Lombardi would later produce.

Legend has it that Lombardi happened upon the format for his complex drawings while talking on the phone to a lawyer friend who was explaining a complicated network of political and corporate relationships. While his friend talked, Lombardi jotted webs to arrange the information in a visually legible manner. Something clicked.

Though these drawings evolved between 1994 and 2000, their content remained remarkably focused on money and transfer among the global power elite: the axis of greed, if you will.

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