Robert Longo

The Milwaukee Art Museum’s new catalogue for The Acceleration of History, featuring contributions from Andera, artist Rashid Johnson, and journalist Tom Teicholz, will be released during the run of Pace’s show and available to purchase on-site at the gallery. A Pace Live performance, featuring musician Rhys Chatham, organized as part the exhibition will take place on Wednesday, September 10, and an opening reception will be held on Thursday, September 11 from 6 to 8 p.m. Both events will be open to the public, and further details will be announced in due course.

The Weight of Hope will highlight Longo’s enduring engagement with social and political happenings in his work across mediums, bringing together large-scale charcoal drawings, films, sculptures, and studies—including private and institutional loans—created between 2014 and 2025. This landmark show at Pace will open on the heels of the artist’s first full-scale Scandinavian survey, on view at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark through August 31, and his presentation of a new multimedia work at Art Basel Unlimited in June.

Over the past decade, the artist has increasingly turned his focus to images from the media, including coverage of the January 6 United States Capitol attack and the Black Lives Matter movement. Building up his hyper realistic, black-and- white charcoal drawings in layers with painstaking attention to light and shadow, he creates highly detailed works based on news photography as well as images of protests, civil unrest, and war on the Internet. Transforming his source images into epically scaled, emotionally resonant compositions, he reflects on power, violence, and national mythmaking. His works slow down the “image storm” and “culture of impatience” in which we live through the historic and venerable medium of charcoal, encouraging viewers to take time to absorb and process the turbulence of the current moment—both in the US and around the globe—while also proposing hope for the future.

“As artists, we’re reporters,” Longo said in a recent interview for his Louisiana Museum of Modern Art exhibition. “Our job is to report what it’s like to be alive now. We’re one of the few professions left in the world that has the opportunity to try to tell the truth. I feel a moral imperative to preserve the images of our shared dystopic present with the hope that something will one day change.”

Born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York, Longo was deeply influenced by social and political issues from an early age. He graduated high school in 1970, weeks after the Ohio National Guard massacred several students at Kent State University who were protesting the US invasion of Cambodia—including one of Longo’s former classmates, whose body was shown in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph that shocked the world. In 1973, Longo enrolled at Buffalo State College, where he trained as a sculptor and began his decades-long friendship with fellow artist Cindy Sherman. The two moved to New York together in 1977, and, throughout the 1980s, Longo frequently performed in New York rock clubs in Menthol Wars, his band with Richard Prince. During this period, he also designed album covers for numerous bands and directed music videos for New Order and R.E.M.

In his first solo exhibition at Metro Pictures in New York in 1981, Longo showed his charcoal and graphite Men in the Cities drawings, works that became icons of the “Pictures Generation.” This group, which includes Longo, Sherman, Prince, Louise Lawler, and David Salle, is known for critiquing the anaesthetizing power of consumer capitalism and the indoctrinating effects of mass media through their art. Working with diverse materials at increasingly ambitious scales over the course of his career, Longo cemented himself as a preeminent artist of his generation. Today, his work can be found in the collections of major museums around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Brooklyn Museum in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; Tate in London; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; and many other international institutions.