Opening at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on May 15, 2025: Curated by Daniel Strong, Associate Director and Curator of Exhibitions, Grinnell College Museum of Art

  • William Villalongo

     

     

    Myths and Migrations

  • 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 

    Myths and Migrations 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.

     

    He works in awareness and in relation to recurring acts of police and vigilante violence against Black and Brown communities and the resulting demands for accountability. Far from seeking more discord, Villalongo transforms polarization into creative inspiration, making room for reflection, healing, and metamorphosis. It is an honor to present his creative voice at a time when history in the United States — who writes it, who teaches it, and who and what gets prioritized or erased from it — is at the forefront of public debate. Villalongo proposes that history is not something to excise or weaponize, but to conceive as an inheritance, a vital tool we can use to reckon with past injustices and to create something new.

     

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

     

  • WILLIAM VILLALONGO MYTHS AND MIGRATIONS Curator Daniel Strong Catalogue Contributors Tiffany E. Barber, PhD Assistant Professor of African American Art...
    William Villalongo, Obertura de la espora (time dancer), 2017 (detail) 

    WILLIAM VILLALONGO

    MYTHS AND MIGRATIONS

     

     
    Curator

    Daniel Strong

     

    Catalogue Contributors

    Tiffany E. Barber, PhD

    Assistant Professor of African American Art at the University of California

    Los Angeles

    LeRonn P. Brooks, Ph.D.
    Associate Curator for Modern and Contemporary Collections, Getty Research Institute

     

     On View:
    Grinnell College Museum of Art

    January 25 – March 31, 2024

     

    Madison Museum of Contemporary Art

    May 4 – August 11, 2024

     

    University of Colorado Art Museum
    September 13 — December 20, 2024
     
    The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
    May 15 — August 31, 2025
     

  • Works in the Exhibition

    Click on each work for more information

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    Early Cut Paper

  • Detail of a work made of cut velour paper showing a figure on a rearing horse in the middle of an anachronistic war
    THE WILD, WILD WEST! (DETAIL)

    My earlier work is highly narrative and episodic. Myth and satire became a way to speak about the poles between fiction and reality.... The unimaginable and ugly reality of the world is sometimes best excised through making, because words lose all meaning in the face of it.

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    Early Painting

  • Abstract composition with many faces forming a landscape and fire
    William Villalongo, Higher Ground, 2007
  • A fan shaped panel of a group of women in Modernist masks by a river
    WILLIAM VILLALONGO, JUBILEE, 2010

     

    Featured Works:

    JUBILEE, 2010

    With the Bathers series I was thinking about "Primitivism," and how art history tells a story about Western abstract art.

    I was thinking about how these terms are inherently problematic, and perhaps even my work at times feels problematic because of it. I was really thinking of how I could mess up this very convenient story that takes us from these Nymph and Bather classical themes into this kind of “radical” space of abstraction in a way in which, magically, Africa doesn't exist in it. A kind of rupture happens in European art and then there's another rupture when you get to the Americas, but it’s all a coincidence that there are affinities with African art. So, the idea came to me of making a type of self-fashioned mythology of a world of women who are using abstract paintings as utilitarian objects, fashioning them as masks, clothing, as building materials for their houses. At the heart of it I was thinking about the story of painting. All of these things that you would see if you walk through the Metropolitan Museum.

    I was questioning how to change the protagonists in that story; fashioning a different set of terms for that story.

  • Navy background painting with feathers and arms floating
    William Villalongo, Olympia's Window, 2015

    Olympia's Window, 2015

     

    An Excerpt from Tiffany Barber's Catalogue essay, Deep Cuts:

    Olympia’s Window (2015) pictures a bather scene inside an aperture that crops the line between voyeur and viewer. But instead of passive objects that exemplify Western ideals of beauty, Villalongo’s Black female figures are not concerned with the male gaze or the colonial gaze. As the artist describes it, the composition is a window into “a fictional society of mostly Black women building their own world out of abstract paintings and as abstract beings.” The work remixes both Édouard Manet’s well-known oil painting from 1863 and Lorraine O’Grady’s 1992 prompt to reclaim the Black female body as a site of subjectivity in art history.[i] Villalongo’s Olympia is neither the white nude prostitute nor the Black female attendant, a relationship that reifies aesthetic hierarchies vis-à-vis the conflation of color and race, despite its so-called radical portrayal of modern urban life. Here, Olympia comes to life in a world of her own making as she breaks the threshold of the heart-shaped aperture to greet a lover. When her hand crosses the boundary between her dwelling and the world beyond her window, it turns to stars. Dismembered limbs and faces, subtly discernible, float mid-air alongside colorful flora and eyes that overlap and surround the maid’s lover as he, too, reaches for connection. Time freezes, mimicking the stillness of the lovers’ bodies suspended in space. This is a world of magic and myth.


    [i] See Lorraine O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” in New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action, eds. Joanna Frueh, Cassandra L. Langer, and Arlene Raven (New York: Icon Editions, 1994), 152–70. The first part of O’Grady’s essay was published in Afterimage 20, 1 (Summer 1992).

  • RE: History, 2015

    14 collages
  • Collage, left panel a photograph of Picasso with Picasso's silhouette replaced by stars, right panel shows a Picasso painting with an African sculpture collaged over the face

     

    William Villalongo, re: History--Affinities (Picasso, Dan), 2015

    RE: History is directed at the fictional histories that most artists are served up in school, a linear narrative of one movement gliding into another, greased with manufactured reasoning that extracts concurrent colonial narratives from the record of 19th and 20th century Euro-American art histories.
    In particular, the idea of "Primitivism," which suggests a type of collective unconscious or coincidence in the affinities between the color, geometry, and imaginative figuration within global indigenous art practices and what we call abstraction in Euro-American art. Contemporary abstraction divorces itself even further under the cover of Eastern developments coming out of Malevich or American developments out of Pollock.
     
  • Collage, left panel image of space, right panel woman in bathing suit wearing an abstract painting mask

     

    William Villalongo, re: History--Jet (Artifact 5), 2015

     In my work, historically excluded voices and time challenge these narratives of an abstraction originating out of “purity” or “universalism,” divorced from cultural influences, signs and content.

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    Work since 2016

  • Hooded figure with large bird in the foreground, two white hands at the sides

     

    William Villalongo, Speak No Evil, 2016

    What is presence? What is Black presence? Is it merely a representation, a kind of faithful representation of an anonymous or known person standing in front of you? Or is it a kind of wave? Is it like a wave in the ocean — building over a long period of time that starts in a quiet way? If presence isn't easy to pinpoint, how do you make it real when you feel it to be? How do you chart it? How do you map it? How do you try to get at the immensity of that presence?

  • Cut black paper showing nude figure cut from filigree, man leans against unseen post and holds red and green baseball cap in right hand
    William Villalongo, Obertura de la Espora (Time Dancer), 2017

    Obertura de la espora (Time Dancer), 2017

     

    An Excerpt from Tiffany Barber's Catalogue essay, Deep Cuts:

    The male protagonists in Villalongo’s universe, transmogrify storylines where goal-directed heroes confront obstacles, overcome them, and eventually reap rewards. The artist’s figures are not exactly anti-heroes, either. They are somewhere in between triumph and resistance, challenging both monomythic and monolithic conceptions of Black diasporic identity — its forms and its formations.

     

    Obertura de la Espora (Time Dancer) (2017) illustrates this phenomenon and the archetypal tropes that Villalongo transfigures in his work. Stark white swooshes and swirls cut a Black male figure against a black velour background. The figure, disaggregated, is separated into component parts not typically associated with Black masculinity — tulips, curved lines, and branches that weave in and out of each other. The piece, whose title loosely translates to “overture of the spore,” is a citation of Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson’s 1797 portrait of Haitian revolutionary Jean-Baptiste Belley leaning against an antique bust of Raynal, a controversial French philosopher who opposed slavery. Girodet’s aristocratic, casually sensuous depiction of Belley represents the complex power matrix at the heart of a shifting political climate concerning France’s investments in slavery and colonialism at the time. Art historians and critics have valorized the rendering of Belley, a former slave turned French deputy, as a polemic against the limits and possibilities of abolition. The original portrait, like Villalongo’s Obertura de la Espora, also marks a subtle transition in Girodet’s painting style from Neoclassicism to Romanticism. Though citational, Villalongo considers his version to be an extension — a long-play remix — rather than a direct translation. Both artists examine portraiture as a practice of power, and both artists construct a sensual image of Black masculinity rooted in the art and politics of their time.

  • Cut black paper showing prone figure, legs and arms painted brown, body cut as filigree from paper
    WILLIAM VILLALONGO, ZERO GRAVITY 2, 2018
  • Figure emerging from leafy cutouts with butterflies and sculptures from a black velvet background

     

    William Villalongo, Power Lawd!, 2019

    Power Lawd!, 2019

     

    An excerpt from an interview with LeRonn Brooks:

    Brooks: You've always had an archive-ish take on memory and the idea of objects speaking together. Now you're entering a space where you have these already existing mythologies that are asking you to accept their terms. Does that affect the way you think about the worlds that you make?

    Villalongo: It makes me realize that how we come to understand “History” has a lot of absences built into it. In the collections I’ve visited there's always objects with a black presence or likeness. But it's very few. It's like the smaller part of what’s on display. I thought, if you put it all together, it's a lot of stuff. And the fact that it's been sitting there this long says that these images and Black presence were important no matter how often institutions make it seem rare. As if they are flukes or “special objects.” Actually, maybe they weren't that "special," just fewer survived. So, we have a mythology of a kind of scarcity of Black presence, a scarcity of Black power, a scarcity of a record of Black engagement with the Western world or in the ancient world which is not true.

    Visibility is powerful. For me, that’s a space where I can start to create.

  • A constellation of crystals, butterflies, geodes, African sculpture, and human motifs intercut with leafy cut-outs
    WILLIAM VILLALONGO, Black Metamorphosis 1452, 2020

    Black Metamorphosis 1452, 2020

     

    An Excerpt from Tiffany Barber's Catalogue essay, Deep Cuts:

    In Villalongo’s hands, play with figure-ground relationships, atmospheric perspective, extraterrestrial environments, and the longue durée of geological time are the makings of a new Black existentialism at the limits of freedom and unfreedom. Black Metamorphosis 1452 (2020) builds on these themes and the artist’s forays into myth and the fantastic. Its iconography underscores the otherworldly dimensions of Black existence across space and time vis-à-vis disaggregated constructions of the Black male form. In this work, branches and floral patterns commingle with butterflies and crystals to cut a figure against a dark black background. A lone eye peeks through a cluster of butterflies. Open hands double as an invitation and a surrender. Vessels, carvings, and other artifacts that link the work to continental African objects and aesthetics are all nestled within Villalongo’s swirling web of image fragments.

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    The Mothership Connection, 2020

  • Collage on black velvet with butterflies, African sculptures, crystals, the blueprints of a slave ship, and human hands, eyes, and feet
    William Villalongo, The Mothership Connection, 2020
  • Detail of a collage on black velvet with butterflies, African sculptures, crystals, and the blueprint of a ship
    William Villalongo, The Mothership Connection, 2020 (left detail)

     

    An Excerpt from Tiffany Barber's Catalogue essay, Deep Cuts:

    The Mothership Connection (2020), elaborates the artist’s interests in existential Blackness, diaspora, migration, deep time, and transformation. The piece juxtaposes a starburst form on the right with a black-on-black reproduction of the now iconic schematic of the Brookes slave ship loaded to capacity with bodies on the left. The Mothership Connection merges pre-slavery with post-slavery conditions of Black being through image and text. While the Brookes image became an emblem for British abolitionists in the late 1700s, the title of the piece references the Parliament Funkadelics’ eponymous album from 1975. P-Funk’s “Mothership Connection” envisioned outer space as a freedom frontier for African Americans, and both the vinyl record and its spaceship cover art have consequently become touchstones for Afrofuturism, a cultural and political movement that has gained considerable currency since the 1990s.

  • Collage on black velvet with butterflies, African sculptures, crystals, and human eyes, hands, and feet
    William Villalongo, The Mothership Connection, 2020 (right detail)

     

    An excerpt from an interview with LeRonn Brooks:

    Brooks: It seems to me that each fragment, or each piece, can be thought of as a lead towards an investigation. It's like hearing a voice and trying to find where the body is that made that voice. I think in terms of genealogical research and the ways in which you can find a name on one census record, but that name may change on another census record because someone doesn't want to write that person's name down properly. So, you have a lead, but that lead brings you toward worlds that may not be fact, because it may not be that person's name. But there’s a way in which context can give you that spur. It's leading you towards this investigation, “what of the Black presence here?” That sounds really generative.

    Villalongo: It has been. That's how I came to the idea of claiming with the velvet material. As I coat objects with velvet fibers it becomes a manifestation of them as “Black” things.

  • A detail image of a collage on black velvet, showing eyes, hands, and feet surrounded by shells and African artifacts
    William Villalongo, The Mothership Connection, 2020 (Right center detail)
    I said to myself, I'm going to go through this process until this object is completely obliterated from its original context and becomes this magical thing.

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    2021-2023

  • Sculpture

  • Black velvet flocked sculptures including seashells, a testa di moro with basil, and drinking gourds hung from gold chains
    William Villalongo, Beacon, 2022

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    Video

  • William Villalongo, Water Root, 2012
    HD BlueRay, 6:53 min, Edition of 5

  • About the artist

    William Villalongo
    WILLIAM VILLALONGO (b. 1975, Hollywood, FL) was raised in Bridgeton, New Jersey, and now lives and works in Brooklyn, New...

    Photo: Argenis Apolinario, NYC

    WILLIAM VILLALONGO (b. 1975, Hollywood, FL) was raised in Bridgeton, New Jersey, and now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received his B.F.A. from The Cooper Union School of Art, NYC, and his M.F.A. from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, in Philadelphia. Recent exhibitions include Yesterday’s Tomorrow: Selections from the Rose Collection, 1933-2018, the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass.; Living in America, curated by Assembly Room, the International Print Center, NYC; Afrocosmologies: American Reflections, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Conn; Young, Gifted, and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art, OSilas Gallery, Concordia College, Bronxville, New York, travelling to Lehman College Art Gallery, Lehman College, Bronx, New York; New Mythologies: William Villalongo, The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts and Culture, Charlotte, NC; Greater New York, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York; and the online exhibition, Life During Wartime, curated by Christian Viveros-Fauné, University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, Fla., among others. In January 2024, Villalongo's solo museum exhibition, Myths and Migrations, originates at the Grinnell College Museum of Art, Grinnell, Iowa, and will travel to three additional venues through summer 2025. He is the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptor's Grant. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum; Grinnell College Museum of Art; 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, among others. Villalongo is an Associate Professor at The Cooper Union School of Art, NYC.

  • About the Curator

    Daniel Strong

    Daniel Strong has been the Associate Director and Curator of Exhibitions at the Grinnell College Museum of Art since 1999. He holds M.A.s from Williams College/Clark Art Institute and  the Department of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University. He added the first piece by William Villalongo, The Wild, Wild West!, to the Grinnell College Museum of Art's collection in 2009; the second, Obertura de la Espora (Time Dancer), in 2018; and the third, The Mothership Connection, in 2021. The exhibition is presented in collaboration with the artist and Susan Inglett Gallery, New York.

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