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, Higher Ground, 2007

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.

WILLIAM VILLALONGO, ZERO GRAVITY 2, 2018

William Villalongo, The Mothership Connection, 2020

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.

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.

William Villalongo, Beacon, 2022