A leading contemporary art personality for many years (in 2016 the Washington City Paper called him “one of the most interesting people of Washington, DC…”, Florencio Lennox Campello was born in Santiago de Cuba, raised in Guantanamo, and exiled as a child to Brooklyn, New York as part of the 1960s Cuban Diaspora. He studied art at the University of Washington School of Art in Seattle, under Professors Norman Lundin, Alden Mason, Jacob Lawrence, Everet DuPen and others. Although he graduated from Washington in 1981, the artist started to sell his work professionally in 1977, when he became one of the regular exhibiting artists at Seattle’s world-famous Pike Place Market, where he sold his art school assignments until 1981.
In that same year that he graduated from Washington, he won the William Whipple National Art Competition First Prize for Printmaking, as well as the Silver Medal at the Ligoa Duncan International Art Competition in Paris and the French “Prix de Peinture de Raymond Duncan,” also in Paris.
Commissioned as an Ensign in the US Navy in 1981, the artist was transferred to Spain, where he worked on a series of landscapes of Andalusia which now hang in many private collections in Spain, Portugal and the United States. In 1985 he returned to the United States, living in Monterey, California (while earning a Masters Degree) and later to Bowie, Maryland. During this period he returned to figurative drawings, as well as delivering illustrations for magazines and periodicals. In 1989 Campello moved to Scotland, where he lived in a 307-year-old farmhouse at the foothills of the Highlands near the ancient Pictish village of Brechin. The rugged character of the Scottish land and his discovery of the mezzotints of David Waterson, a mid-century Scottish printmaker, revived his previous interest in landscape, and for the next three years he produced over three hundred watercolors of Scotland. This work earned him the First Prize in watercolors at the 42nd Annual International North Wynd River Art Competition in the United States.
In 1992 the artist returned to America, and lived for a year in Sonoma, California, where he produced over 400 commissioned drawings for the Sonoma Ballet Conservatory. Upon completion of this project, he relocated to the Greater Washington, DC area. In 1996 he opened the Fraser Gallery in Washington, DC and then in Bethesda, Maryland. He was the co-owner of the gallery until 2006, at which time he re-located to Media, Pennsylvania. He returned to the DC area in 2009, where he currently resides.
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 Popov Museum in Russia, the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico City, the Rock Springs Art Center in Wyoming, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Washington, DC, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder, Colorado, the Boise Museum of Art in Idaho, the Greenville Museum of Art in North Carolina, and the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora in Miami, Florida.
As an experienced curator, has also curated several important shows in the capital area, 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 area, and subsequently “Seven” for the Washington Project for the Arts/Corcoran, where seven galleries were filled by selected DC area artists. In 2006 he also curated the worldwide “Homage to Frida Kahlo” exhibition for Art.com and the Cultural Institute of Mexico. Also starting that year, he spent a significant amount of time in Miami, where his family had relocated in the late 1970s, and began exhibiting his work at various art fairs during the Art Basel week of Miami art fairs. Campello is also a regularly published art critic of regional prominence. His art reviews have appeared in dozens of magazines and newspapers, as well as “Daily Campello Art News,” an online BLOG with over seven million visitors that he edits and publishes. He is also often heard on NPR discussing art issues as well as on the television program ArtsMedia News. He is the author of “100 Artists of Washington, DC” published in 2011 by Schiffer Press.
He is represented in the United States by Projects Gallery (Miami, FL), Alida Anderson Art Projects (Maryland), Zenith Gallery (Washington, DC), WGS Contemporary (Washington, DC), and Mayer Fine Art (Virginia).
