William Villalongo: Myths and Migrations

A black print featuring white cut-outs of plants that create the shape of a bird and a bust. Over the top is a grey hood from a hoodie, and in the top corners are hands.

William Villalongo, Speak No Evil,Ìý2016. Acrylic, paper collage, and cut velour paper. (c) William Villalongo. Courtesy of Hugh J. Freund.

A silver serving tray floating against a black background. Meat, cheese, guns, flowers and other objects are stacked atop the tray. Hanging above are a pair of shoes and a dead bird.

William Villalongo, Feast with Nkisi,Ìý2021. Acrylic and velvet flocking on wood panel. (c) William Villalongo. Courtesy of the artist and Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC.

On view September 13 – December 20, 2024

This exhibition presents almost 20 years of artmaking by William Villalongo, including figural and narrative paintings, works on paper, and sculpture that incorporate flocking, cut paper, and collage. His practice is informed by research in the natural and social sciences, mythologies and folklore, popular culture imagery, and the history of art — particularly African objects and their appropriation in Euro-American art movements — exploring invisibility and revelation of Black presence against the backdrop of race. Bodies, objects, and interstitial spaces in Villalongo’s work help navigate ideas about seeing and being seen, while also connecting contemporary concepts of presence and erasure with their antecedents through time and across cultures.

William Villalongo (b. 1975, Hollywood, FL) was raised in New Jersey and is now based in Brooklyn, New York. He has been the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptor's Grant. In 2021 he was awarded the Jules Guerin/Harold M. English Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Princeton University Art Museum; Studio Museum, Harlem; Weatherspoon Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Yale University Art Gallery, in addition to the Grinnell College Museum of Art. He is an associate professor in the School of Art at The Cooper Union in New York.

This exhibition was organized by the Grinnell College Museum of Art. Ìý

This exhibition and programming is generously supported by ²ÊÃñ±¦µä Student Arts and Cultural Enrichment fees and CU Art Museum members. Ìý

To cut and paste over and under, to cut and see through, to cut and back up, to cut and paint in and on is to enact on real material the felt experience of moving though the world in a racialized body, with a hope that it conveys something of the precarity of life itself and how we are all implicated in the struggles of others.
— William Villalongo