Florencio Lennox Campello

 

Florencio Lennox Campello was born in Guantanamo, Cuba and studied art at the University of Washington School of Art in Seattle, Washington from which he graduated in 1981. While there Campello helped to create the Arts NW Student Gallery in Seattle, the area’s first art gallery focused on student artwork. He also organized several exhibitions at the School of Art.

In that same year that he graduated from Washington, he won the William Whipple National Art Competition First Prize for Printmaking, the silver medal at the Ligoa Duncan Art Competition in Paris and the French “Prix de Peinture de Raymond Duncan,” also in Paris. Campello lived in Spain from 1981-1985 and then returned to Europe, living in Scotland from 1989-1992.

In addition to numerous galleries, his work has been exhibited at the McManus Museum in Scotland, the Brusque Museum in Brazil, the San Bernardino County Art Museum in California, the Musee des Duncan in France, the Frick Museum in Ohio, the Meadows Museum of Art in Shreveport, Louisiana, the Hunter Museum in Tennessee, the Sacramento Fine Arts Center in California, The Art League in Alexandria, The Museum of Contemporary Art in DC, the Rock Springs Art Center in Wyoming and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder, Colorado, the Popov Museum in Russia and the Museum of Small Art in Malaysia.

In 1996 Campello opened the Fraser Gallery in Washington, DC. Within five years the gallery had become one of the most important independent fine arts commercial galleries in the city and in 2000 became one of only three DC area art galleries to be invited to become a Sotheby’s Associate Dealer. In 2002 Campello opened a second Fraser Gallery in Bethesda, Maryland, at the time the largest art gallery in the Greater DC area. In 2006 Campello turned over all gallery operations to his partner and relocated to the Philadelphia area, where he lived for three years until returning the DC area in 2009. In addition to organizing and curating several hundred exhibitions for the Fraser Gallery, he is also an independent curator and has organized many important shows in the Washington D.C. capital city area, and other places such as the 2001 “Survey of Washington Realists” at the Athenaeum in Alexandria, a huge salon style show that for the first time catalogued together the artists working in the realist tradition in the DC area. He also organized a worldwide homage to Mexican artist Frida Kahlo in association with the Cultural Institute of Mexico and most recently he reviewed the work of over 2,000 artists and organized a seven-gallery show for the Washington Project for the Arts/Corcoran in Washington, DC.

Campello is also a regularly published art critic of regional prominence. His art reviews have appeared on DC One Magazine, Cultureflux Magazine, ArtsKrush Magazine, Art Calendar Magazine, Visions Magazine for the Arts, Dimensions Magazine, Pitch Magazine, The City Beat, Washingtonpost.com and various local newspapers. Furthermore, since 1998, Campello has taught over 3,000 artists, museum professionals, arts faculty and new gallerists through a highly successful one-day seminar titled “Success as an Artist,” which has also been dubbed “Boot camp for Artists.” Campello is also one of the Internet’s leading arts bloggers, and since 2003 his visual arts blog (Daily Campello Art News) has been one of the web’s first art blogs and currently has logged over five million visitors, making it one of the highest ranked art blogs in the world. In 2009, world famous American art collector Mera Rubell selected one of his pieces for her 2010 “Cream” auction at the Katzen Museum in Washington, DC. He is the author of “100 Artists of Washington, DC”, published in 2011 by Schiffer Press.

For the last few years Campello has been refining a marriage of traditional narrative drawing with embedded digital technology components such as video, PowerPoint presentations, motion detectors and digital imagery. The work uses the embedded technology components to enhance and add to the narrative focus of the overall work and represent one of the first seminal movements in the marriage of technology with traditional art genres.

https://www.zenithgallery.com/artists/f-lennox-campello/