- Six years before his death, Lombardi switched to link analysis pencil diagrams of crime and conspiracy networks that he would become best known for. In the early 1990s, he began researching the many scandals of the time, including the BCCI scandal, the Harken Energy scandal, and the Savings and Loan scandal.
- He majored in art history at Syracuse University, and graduated with a B.A in 1974.
- While still an undergraduate, Lombardi had a job as chief researcher for a 1973 art exhibit Teapot Dome to Watergate - a multimedia collage, all of whose elements focused on various US governmental scandals; it was motivated by the then-ongoing Watergate scandal.
- One of his large drawings, an airy composition of small circles and crisscrossing arced lines that resembled rose windows or fanciful architectural rendering, is included in the ''Greater New York'' exhibition at P.S. 1 in Long Island City.
- Lombardi's interest in presenting pure information qualified him as a Conceptual artist, but in many ways he was an investigative reporter after the fact.
- As an artist, Lombardi was an unusual case: a late bloomer who developed his mature style after the age of 40, but who was experiencing the rapid ascent of a younger artist.
- Lombardi was an American neo-conceptual artist who specialized in drawings that document alleged financial and political frauds by power brokers, and in general "the uses and abuses of power".
- 20 of Lombardi's drawings are in the permanent collection of MoMA.[17] Another 10 of his drawings are at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and were the subject of an FBI investigation after the September 11 attacks in 2001.
- In 1975, James Harithas (the former director of the Syracusan Everson Museum) hired Lombardi to be an assistant curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas, where Harithas had become director. Lombardi worked there for approximately two years, until 1976. While in Houston, he also opened a small art gallery, "Square One".
- In March 2000, on the day before his death, Lombardi moved all his work to Pierogi 2000. He then bolted his apartment from the inside and hanged himself, on the day before his birthday and three years after he had moved to Williamsburg.
- He became a general reference librarian for the Fine Arts department in the Houston Public Library, started a regional artist archive, and wrote two books, one on the drug wars and another on the neglected and forgotten art genre of panoramas. During this time, Lombardi was also an abstract painter of no particular note; he pursued painting as a hobby during his actual career as an archivist and reference librarian.
- A major exhibit of Lombardi's art, "Mark Lombardi: Global Networks," was organized by Independent Curators International and curated by Robert Hobbs. The exhibit traveled to nine museums over 2003-2005, and has been the subject of several reviews. The exhibit catalog was published by Independent Curators in 2003.
- In 2012, German director Mareike Wegener released a documentary on Lombardi, entitled Mark Lombardi: Death-Defying Acts Of Art And Conspiracy. The movie premiered in May 2012 in Germany and the Brooklyn Film Festival, and then opened in September at MoMA in New York. Reviewers of the movie suggested that, unlike Lombardi's own work, it relies too much on innuendo and too little on factual information, and that it focuses too much on testimonials from friends and does not adequately explain the impact of Lombardi's art.
- Lombardi ran a small gallery while making abstract paintings on the side. He began making his drawings in 1993, inspired by a doodled diagram he had made while talking on the phone to a banker friend about the savings and loan scandal. Reading several newspapers a day, he culled his information entirely from published sources, keeping track of the articles with a card file that eventually held over 12,000 cards.
- Mark Lombardi Mark Lombardi, an artist whose elegant, minutely detailed diagrams of political and financial scandals brought a distinctive voice to late Conceptualism, was found hanged in his loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the police said.
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