Pollock-Krasner Grant, Sally and Milton Avery Grant, Marie Walsh Sharpe Residency
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.
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.
