F. Lennox Campello

Florencio Lennox Campello was born in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba in 1956,[1] and immigrated as a child to the United States in the 1960s along with his political refugee parents.[6][7][8] He studied art at the University of Washington (BA, 1981), where he was commissioned as a U.S. Navy officer,[9][10][11] and subsequently received an MS from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California in 1987.[1][9][12]

Campello's art is predominantly narrative and storytelling in nature,[13] and often incorporates technology such as video,[14] sound, and miniature spy cameras[3] into the finished pieces.[3] He has exhibited widely in the United States, Europe and Latin America,[1] including in the McManus Museum in Scotland, the Brusque Museum in Brazil, the San Bernardino County Museum in California, the Meadows Museum of Art in Shreveport, Louisiana, the Hunter Museum of American Art in Tennessee, the Sacramento Fine Arts Center in California, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Colorado, the A.S. Popov Central Museum of Communications in Russia, the American University Museum, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum at the University of Oregon, and the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora.[1][10][15][16][17]

Campello was awarded the 1979 First Prize (Drawing) by Renton Art Society Renton, Washington,[16] 1981 First Prize (Drawing). from the Keene-Mason Gallery National Competition New York, NY,[1] 1981 First Prize (Printmaking), Whipple Gallery National Competition, Marshall, MN,[1] the 1995 Best of Show at the 20th Princess Anne Art Show in Virginia Beach, VA,[31] Best of Show at the 1996 Festival in the Park in Roanoke, Virginia,[31] and the Best in Show at the 2007 Stockley Gardens Art Festival in Norfolk, VA.[31] He was most recently awarded a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in 2019,[32] and one of his works was acquired in 2018 for the permanent collection of Montgomery County, Maryland.[33]

In a review of his 1996 exhibition of portraits of Internet porn stars, The Washington Post noted that his artwork "manages to find a delicate balance between the black charcoal and cream-colored paper resulting in a grainy, film-noir effect, making his subjects, traffickers in mass-consumption prurience, seem tough but vulnerable, like a flowering plant in a sexual wasteland."[34]

A more recent review of his 2017 solo show in The Washington Post explained that "His technique is classical, but he sometimes incorporates a contemporary technology: embedded video. “Portrait of You” features a live feed of the picture's viewer, and “Cuban by Ancestry, but American by the Grace of God” (seen last year at the American University Museum) chronicles his family history on a video loop."[3] In reviewing the same show, The Washington City Paper noted that the solo show focused "on a couple of his far-ranging “artistic obsessions,” as he calls them, from Frida Kahlo to the Book of Genesis to the Picts of Scotland."[27]

American art critic Dr. Claudia Rousseau observed that "Campello is a prolific artist who has had an interesting and compelling trajectory of work since the 1980s."[3][13][34][27][35] Brickell Magazine described him as "a thought leader in the world of the arts on a global scale."[36] In 2020 The Washington City Paper characterized him as a "prominent figure" in discussing artistic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.[37]

His blog, Daily Campello Art News has been published since 2003 and has been called "indispensable",[50] and also "a bona fide fixture"[51] by the Washington City Paper, which also credits the blog with being the potential "inventor" of the ubiquitous acronym "DMV" to refer to the Greater Washington, DC area (it stands for District, Maryland, Virginia).[52] The local CBS TV station included it in its "Best Local Bloggers" list.[53] The blog is included in the various "Top 100 Art Blogs in the World" listings.[54]

Campello is the author of 100 Artists of Washington, DC,[55][56] Schiffer Publishing, Ltd. (June 1, 2011) ISBN 978-0764337789. He is also the cover artist for Cuba in Verse: The Island Behind Bars by Ada Bezos, Editorial Betania (2012) ISBN 978-8480174008, and the cover artist and interior illustrator for Winging It!-In Europe by Linda and Jim Stringer, Suncity Pub (January 1, 1993) ISBN 978-1882410002

In 1996 Campello, together with his then wife, the British photographer Catriona Fraser, co-founded the Fraser Gallery in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC.[40] In 2002 they opened a second gallery in Bethesda, MD.[57] The two galleries closed in 2011,[58] as the couple had divorced earlier,[51] and Campello had moved to Philadelphia in 2006,[59] where he lived until 2009, before returning to the Washington, DC area in 2010.

Campello has curated many visual art shows,[60][61][62] most generally around the Greater Washington, DC region, including several seminal art shows focused on dissident Cuban artists,[63][64][65] and has been referred to as "one of the most well known faces on the local art scene."[63]

• F. Lennox Campello website
• Daily Campello Art News Blog