KEITH LONG was born in Chicago, Illinois and began studying artmaking formally at age seven. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA, 1961) and the University of Wisconsin in Madison (MS, MFA, 1963). By age 19 he began his professional career as a painter in a two-person exhibit at the Palmer House Gallery in Chicago and was accepted with an Honorable Mention to the Annual Chicago and Vicinity Exhibition. In the mid-1970s Keith began constructing reliefs using natural and found materials.
The artist’s process involves a sympathetic synthesis with nature; integral to the formation of a new piece is a respect for the gestalt of the original sources. Through his transformative process detritus reforms into art — a kind of palimpsest, where the new life retains the traces of its own previous history.
Long has exhibited extensively in New York and Paris with solo shows regularly at OK Harris Gallery in New York from 1978 until its closure in 2013 and with Galerie Lélia Mordoch in Paris and Miami since 1991. One-person exhibitions include the American University in Paris, Scope NYC and Cultural Instituto Peruano Norteamericano, Lima, Peru. His works have been exhibited widely across the United States and France including exhibitions at Musée des Beaux Arts in Bernay, France and the Monart Museum of Fine Art in Ashdod, Israel.
Keith Long’s works are in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the US Embassy in Papua, New Guinea; and McCormick Place Convention Center, Chicago.
He taught art for 37 years at the University of Wisconsin, Rhode Island School of Design, and Parsons School of Design, where he was an Assistant Chair in New York and the Acting Director of Parsons in Paris. He left teaching in 1999.
Keith Long lives in New York City and Paris.
“My pieces are built physically using a kind of collage mentality, adding and/or subtracting chunks of material at will. These materials vary - sometimes they come already manufactured from another source and are used as is, sometimes they are raw material directly from natural sources, and sometimes they are completely reworked by me, shaped, carved, painted, etc. I am most pleased with a piece when it is impossible to determine at what point intervention on my part has taken place.”