In Vanitas, the artist explores the imagery of late 17th and 18th century European paintings which depict Black servant boys presenting their masters with ornate trays of fruit, often surrounded by pets and other signifiers of wealth. Historical genres like vanitas or memento mori paintings speak to that arrogance by invocating the certainty of death. Villalongo’s Vanitas features the ornate tray and fruit of these older works but with the unsettling addition of a photo of Dylann Roof. He says, “For me, Dylann Roof’s crime immediately recalled the 16th street Baptist Church bombing of 1963. Though I am much younger, my childhood was filled with stories that marked the Civil Rights Movement in this country. There was a collapse of time that felt palpable. Roof shows us how far we have come since 1964 and we can talk about progress in policy, but justice, in theory and not practice, is an incomplete justice. It is the image of Roof and those like him that is the mirror we need to confront, not an image of the slain.”