Ocean Gleaners with Pam Longobardi
We’re creating a special display at The Baker Museum to help illustrate the impact of plastics on the Gulf of Mexico, and we need your help.
What to do
If you find plastic items while visiting the beach, drop them off at Artis—Naples during our free Art After Hours event on October 27 from 6pm to 9pm or our free Community Day activities on November 13 from noon to 4pm.
Go further
Read the words on this page from artist/environmentalist Pam Longobardi: have you found plastic items washed up from the Gulf that have a story to tell? If you find an extra-interesting plastic item, please take a photo, write a message and share both through email to jwozniak@artisnaples.org.
Come see
The plastic objects you collect will become part of a special work of art on display at The Baker Museum, as part of the exhibition Pam Longobardi: Ocean Gleaning. Not only will you be helping to restore our Southwest Florida beaches to their natural beauty, your efforts will become part of a larger artistic collaboration that may reach far beyond the shores of our community — and change the world.
Kris Braga, Coastal Brooklyn, New York
A vintage plastic Lido USA stopwatch said, “The clock is ticking! Time to clean up our act.”
Peggy Cyphers, Chesapeake Beach, Maryland
Scarlet Fossil. Water rolls along the clay cliffs and invites the senses to experience and absorb its power. Meanwhile this scarlet artifact of plastic responds and dances, and travels into eternity.
Anthropocene Time Capsule
Tybee Beach, 2018
Installation at Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia.
”
Look around. Listen. What is nature telling us? The biological intelligence of nature is communicating with us. The ocean is speaking through the plastic we have made. It finds its way around the world through the ocean, and the ocean is now expelling it back to us with a message.
Find the most interesting plastic messages. Take a picture of the site before you pick up the object. Tell us the message you received. What is the ocean saying?
— Pam Longobardi
About the artist
Artist Pam Longobardi utilizes found ocean plastics as her primary source material, arranging hundreds of plastic pieces into meticulous wall-mounted artworks or turning them into monumental floor-based sculptures. Working collaboratively with communities around the globe, Longobardi has cleaned beaches from Hawaii to Greece to Panama, and dozens of locations in between, removing tens of thousands of pounds of plastic from the environment and transforming them into thought-provoking works of art.
Banner image above: Pam Longobardi (American, b. 1958). Swerve (detail), 2019. Over 500 ocean plastic objects from Alaska, Greece, California, Hawaii, Gulf of Mexico and Costa Rica, steel specimen pins; 96 x 54 x 8 inches. Courtesy of the Artist. © Pam Longobardi 2021