Black Menagerie, a product of Villalongo’s 2022 Residency at The American Academy in Rome, expands upon the artist’s work toward a comprehensive representation of Black identity. As a researcher and collector of material culture, the artist composes kaleidoscopic collages that simultaneously disassemble and reconstruct perceptions of the Black past. Featuring a strategic use of imagery and material, each panel is populated with collections of ancient slipware from North Africa and pottery from the American South, geological forms, seashells, butterflies, and Etruscan vases caught up in the current that connects shared histories of the Black Black Atlantic and Black Mediterranean.

Villalongo returns to his characteristic motifs such as the drinking gourd, a coded symbol for The Big Dipper used as a navigational device on The Underground Railroad, while adding imagery associated with Mediterranean and North African mythologies to his metaphoric vocabulary. Black Menagerie makes a case for an expanded understanding of Black identity that reaches back in time and across continents to establish an ancient and deeply rooted history.