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William Villalongo
Myths and Migrations
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Artist's Statement
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
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WILLIAM VILLALONGO
MYTHS AND MIGRATIONS
Catalogue Contributors
Tiffany E. Barber, PhD
Assistant Professor, Africana Studies and Art History, University of Delaware
LeRonn P. Brooks, Ph.D.
Associate Curator for Modern and Contemporary Collections, Getty Research InstituteInquiries
Daniel Strong
strongdj@grinnell.edu
WORKS
34 pieces in various media
SPACE REQUIRED
3,500 square feet
FEE
$35,000
Available 2022 - 2024
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Works in the Exhibition
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EARLY CUT PAPER WORKS
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William Villalongo, The Wild, Wild, West!, 2007
Collection of the Grinnell College Museum of Art, Grinnell, IA
"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...
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WILLIAM VILLALONGO, Father I Cannot Tell A Lie, 2009
Collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC
...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."
- William Villalongo
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WILLIAM VILLALONGO, Jubilee, 2010
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EARLY SCULPTURE
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re: History
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William Villalongo, re: History--Affinities (Picasso, Dan), 2015
"A figure, a still life, a painting, a drawing or a sculpture are vessels for information and sites to produce meaning...
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William Villalongo, re: History--Jet (Artifact 5), 2015
...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 Villalongo
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Recent Works
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WILLIAM VILLALONGO, ODALISQUE WAS A SLAVE, 2017
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William Villalongo, Power Lawd!, 2019
"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...
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William Villalongo, Speak No Evil, 2016
...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."
- William Villalongo
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WILLIAM VILLALONGO, ZERO GRAVITY 1, 2018
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WILLIAM VILLALONGO, THE MOTHERSHIP CONNECTION (DIPTYCH), 2020
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VIDEO
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William Villalongo, Water Root, 2012HD BlueRay, 6:53 min, Edition of 5
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PERFORMANCE
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William Villalongo, Arsenal, 2004
Performance at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC
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Photo: Argenis Apolinario, NYC
WILLIAM VILLALONGO (b. 1975, Hollywood, FL) was raised Bridgeton, NJ and now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. 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 at Temple University, Philadelphia. Recent exhibitions include Yesterday’s Tomorrow: Selections from the Rose Collection, 1933-2018, the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; Living in America, curated by Assembly Room, the International Print Center, NYC; Afrocosmologies: American Reflections, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Young, Gifted, and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art, OSilas Gallery, Concordia College, Bronxville, NY, travelling to Lehman College Art Gallery, Lehman College, Bronx, NY; 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, NY; and the online exhibition, Life During Wartime, curated by Christian Viveros-Fauné, University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL, among others. In 2023, Villalongo will have a solo museum exhibition originating at the Grinnell College Museum of Art, Grinnell, IA. 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, Grinnell, IA; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC; Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC; Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, among others. Villalongo is an Associate Professor at The Cooper Union School of Art, NYC.
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About the Curator
Daniel StrongDaniel 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.
A Traveling Exhibition: Curated by Daniel Strong, Associate Director and Curator of Exhibitions, Grinnell College Museum of Art
Current viewing_room