Known for irreverent riffs on the art historical "muse," William Villalongo has made episodic paintings and works on paper which underscore historical erasure and reimagined narratives. With this ambitious new body of work, Villalongo turns his attention to the Black male figure, returning to his signature cut velvet paper writ large as demanded by his subject.
At a time when current events and statistics reflect a social reality of limited expectations, contingency, and disproportionate fear for the Black body, Villalongo reconsiders and modifies that body to circumvent corporeality. Within the dark tones of these meditations on physiology, the artist uses metaphors of invisibility, nature, and reformation as necessary conditions of Black male being. Like fallen autumn leaves, Villalongo's figures navigate their world, subject to an unpredictable wind - piling, spinning, re-collecting and migrating. Figures float in space, dreamlike, liminal, ill-defined much like the accumulated notions of what it is to be Black in the world.
WILLIAM VILLALONGO was born in 1975 and raised in Bridgeton, NJ. He received his B.F.A. from The Cooper Union School of Art and his M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art at Temple University. Villalongo has exhibited extensively with recent appearances in "Woke! William Villalongo and Mark Thomas Gibson" at the USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa; "Go Figure" at the PIzzuti Collection, Columbus; and "Oscillation," curated by Dan Cameron for Ferrera Gallery, New Orleans. Villalongo is the co-curator with Gibson of the highly acclaimed traveling exhibition "Black Pulp" which tells a story of evolving perspectives of Black identity as told by artists of color from 1912 to the present. His work has been included in recent shows at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, MoMA PS1, the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Reviews have appeared in Artforum, ARTnews, The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Village Voice among others. Villalongo's work is included in collections at the Baltimore Museum, the Denver Art Museum, Princeton University Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum among others.
Thursday, February 28: 12pm–8pm
Friday, March 1: 12pm–8pm
Saturday, March 2: 12pm–7pm
Sunday, March 3: 12pm–5pm
