Greg Lindquist

Greg Lindquist (born May 9, 1979) is an American artist, painter, writer, and educator based in New York. His wok addresses landscape, industrial infrastructure, environmental disasters, and the visual expression of pollution through painting, installation, and research-based public projects. Critics and writers have discussed his work in relation to the post-industrial landscape, coal ash, diesel emissions, wildfire imagery, and the political history of American landscape painting.

Lindquist's project include early paintings of deindustrialized urban sites of gentifrication, the participatory environmental project Smoke and Water, the coal ash painting series Of Ash and Coal, the diesel particulate and rolling coal project Slow Burn, and later wildfire paintings.

Early life and education Greg Lindquist was born in Wilmington, North Carolina. 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 de Kooning. He also worked as an assistant for the artist Ryan McGinness.

Work Early Industrial Landscapes

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.

Smoke and Water

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.

Newtown Creek

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

"Smoke and Water: Catawba", Partnership with Art in Buildings, Monroe, NC

2014

"Smoke and Water", Partnership with Working Films, Wilmington, NC

2009

"Brooklyn Industry", Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY

2008

"Remembrance of Things Present", NC State University, College of Design, Raleigh, NC. Travels to Bethel University, St.Paul, MN.

Awards and residencies Marie Walsh Sharpe Residency Participant (2013–2014) Milton & Sally Avery Foundations Grant (2009) 2008-09 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grantee (2009) Art Omi International Artists' Residency Participant, (2009)

Group exhibitions

2016 "Altered Land", North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC

2012 "Broken Desert - Land and Sea", University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ "Art on Paper 2012", Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC

2010 "Planet of Slums", curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud and La Toya Frazier, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ (2010); Third Streaming, NY, NY (2011) "Frozen Moments: Architecture Speaks Back", Ministry of Transportation Project, organized by Laura Palmer Foundation (Poland), Tbilisi, Georgia