Art Brokerage - Mark Lombardi (1951 – March 22, 2000) was an American Neo-Conceptualist and an abstract artist who specialized in drawings attempting to document financial and political frauds by power brokers, and in general 'the uses and abuses of power'. Lombardi was born in the town of Manlius, New York, just outside Syracuse, New York. He majored in art history at Syracuse University. He 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. In 1975, James Harithas (the director of the Syracusan Everson Museum) hired him to be a curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas, which Harithas had become a director of. Lombardi accepted the job at and worked there for approximately two years, until 1976. Then, Lombardi became a general reference librarian for the Fine Arts department in the Houston Public Library, where he started a regional artist archive. Lombardi moved to New York City since that would get him away from Houston, and because his work was going to be shown in a show at New York's Drawing Center, called Selections: Winter 1997. Fred Tomaselli lived in New York, and had been trying to persuade Lombardi to move to Williamsburg, New York. While for most of his career, Lombardi was an abstract painter of no particular note (he pursued it sort of as a hobby during his actual career as an archivist and reference librarian), six years before his death he switched to the pencil diagrams of crime and conspiracy networks that he would be come best known for.