Over the past 20 years, I’ve worked to express the absurdity, beauty and vulnerability of black presence against the backdrop of race. The works become portals or navigational devices for thinking about the mystery within human experience through the poetics of history, myth and satire.

My earlier work is highly narrative and episodic. Myth and satire became a way to speak about the poles between fiction and reality that accompany perceptions of black people and the relative absence and presence of the black image in the Western historical context. Myths for better and for worse allow us to see the unimaginable or the not yet imagined. The history of race fiction is a lesson in how this poetic can be misused. I find myself compelled towards such problematic spaces to turn them into places of invention and inquiry. This is true of many cultures in which myth is a catalyst for healing and connecting to deep time. I feel the treachery of the imagination can also coalesce into images of beauty and resilience.

In recent work, I am transplanting the inherent and persistent fragility that surrounds black life within the symbolic languages of healing, power, metamorphic and geologic transformation. The works are embedded with images of crystals, meteorites, butterflies and African sculpture. I believe this speaks to notions of liberation and remembrance in the afterlives of extraction and migration. These ideas play out across the relationships and gaps between figure and body as subject and object. The cut and collage become methodologies for transferring these ideas into material. 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. This is not about pain. It’s about love. It’s about recognizing that we are more than flesh, that we hold and release time and histories.

In all, my work is concerned with stories and images of time and change in the arch of inhumanity to humanity that has marked the black experience. This is my subject and my study as an artist. I often work in series and I look for frameworks to make these concerns visible. A figure, a still life, a painting, a drawing or a sculpture are vessels for information and sites to produce meaning. My work is informed by humor, urgent emotion, ephemeral visions, current events, black critical theory, western and not-western symbolisms in culture and art. I want to create sites of contemplation and wonder.

- William Villlalongo, 2020

Works in the Exhibition

William Villalongo, Arsenal, 2004

Performance at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC

Daniel Strong has been the Associate Director and Curator of Exhibitions at the Grinnell College Museum of Art since 1999. He holds Master's degrees from Williams College in collaboration with the Clark Art Institute and from the Department of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University. He acquired his first piece by William Villalongo, The Wild, Wild West, for the Grinnell College Museum of Art Collection in 2009, and the second, Obertura de la Espora (Time Dancer) in 2018. The exhibition is presented in collaboration with the artist and Susan Inglett Gallery, New York.