Charles Long

Since the early 1990’s, Charles Long has explored the possibilities of sculpture through a rich vocabulary of materials, colors, images and shapes. Incorporating references to art history, popular culture, nature and his own experiences, Long’s work embraces modernist convention as a means of connecting inner and outer realities, forming pathways between one’s mental and bodily experiences and the surrounding environment. Through his many bodies of work over the years, the artist has consistently confronted formal parameters associated with sculpture as obstacles to push beyond, seeing modernism’s trajectory as unfinished and full of possibility.

Download Artist's CV

Born in 1958 in Long Branch, New Jersey, Long currently lives and works in California. In 1981, he received a BFA from Philadelphia College of Art while also participating in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program that year, and later earned an MFA from Yale University in New Haven in 1988. Since then, the artist has received a number of honors and awards, most recently the 2008 Award of Merit Medal for Sculpture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York. He currently teaches as a professor in the Art Department at the University of California, Riverside.

Throughout the past two decades, Long’s work has been the subject of major exhibitions worldwide. His most important solo presentations include CATALIN at The Contemporary Austin in Texas (2014), Fountainhead, a public commission in Dallas, Texas organized by the Nasher Sculpture Center (2013), Pet Sounds at Madison Square Park in New York City (2012), Seeing Green, a solo project in conjunction with All of this and nothing: The 6th Hammer Invitational at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2011), 100 Pounds of Clay at Orange County Museum of Art in California (2010), and More Like a Dream Than a Scheme at David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University in Rhode Island, which traveled to SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico (2005).

His work was featured twice in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1997, 2008), and has also been included in notable group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, SculptureCenter in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, among other museums.

His work is represented in important public and private collections worldwide, including those of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art, St. Louis Art Museum in Missouri, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.

Charles Long

Online Publication