Longo is a well-established artist and a major presence in the 1980s New York art scene. He helped usher in a new sort of American neo-expressionism which effectively marked a return to traditional media and semi-traditional subject matter. Longo’s landmark Men in the Cities series (a misnomer, perhaps, given that the series features wildly haunting representations of women as well as men) consists of photo-realistic charcoal compositions of figures in motion. Do the images depict violence? Are the men and women blissfully dancing? Does it matter? The emotionality of the work is ambiguous but immediate.