In 1957 Longo became a lynchpin in the soon to be legendary art department of Bennington College that attracted Clement Greenburg and Color Field Painters like Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski. In his 10 years at this Vermont woman's college, Longo helped give printmaking an academic seriousness and became friends with Peter Stroud and Tony Smith. His paintings became less gestural and more spare and frontal. He began working with grids and with centralized images, some inspired by the mandala-circle within a square and a dot in the middle. In 1967 Smith was instrumental in Longo's return to New York City to teach full-time, again mostly printmaking, at another soon-to-be legendary art department, this one at the larger and grittier Hunter College, with which Longo would remain affiliated for 35 years. In the 70's he began exhibiting regularly, at the Susan Caldwell and Condesco Lawler Galleries in Soho and at the Andrew Crispo Gallery uptown. His grids became increasingly suggestive-of ground plans, for example, and aerial reconnaissance photographs, and forests, and the dazzling possibilities of the design imagination. His prints could be experimental in their gestural expressiveness and freedom of technique, his paintings in the variety of applications of paint-pouring, splattering, blotting, throwing- and their investigations of light and scale: Longo is equally comfortable working with a small, medium or large canvas. 

With all it's experimentation, Longo's work has tended to remain both regular and improvisational, immediate and indeterminate, agitated and calm. The light in his paintings is often distinctive in its warmth, radiating from the paint rather than reflected, physical, often tactile, yet illusive, sometimes with a pantheistic pervasiveness. Still today fascinated by the idea that Neolithic ornament could be the origin of abstraction, Longo has alluded to ornament in many ways, including a multitude of fabric and textile-like patterns. His horizontal lines can suggest threads, his markings a myriad stitches. Longo was never interested in the idea of modernism as a sequence of superceding heroic developments. Even at it's most confident and bold, his work does not covet the spotlight or claim a place in the world. At it's most restless and anxious, his painting has a softness, even a gentleness. Long's art partakes of many of the major pictorial developments of 1940 to 1970, yet it always remains a bit apart. The investigation of energy, equilibrium and radiance through the pleasures and challenges of painting and print-making has shaped his art and life for more than 50 years.

Michael Brenson

From catalogue for retrospective exhibition:

VINCENT LONGO

Reflections on Abstraction

Five Decades of Paintings and Prints, 2003

Hunter College, Times Square Gallery, New York City