Queen of Cups, created for a presentation of past Artists in Residence for the Studio Museum Harlem, 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, the work is populated with collections of ancient slipware from North Africa and their modern-day equivalents, 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. Queen of Cups 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.