William Villalongo
WILLIAM VILLALONGO
William Villalongo lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He was born in 1975 in Hollywood, FL and raised in the town of Bridgeton, NJ. He received his BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and his MFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University and attended Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture residency. Villalongo's creative output involves studio practice, writing and curatorial projects. His figurative paintings, works on paper and sculpture are concerned with representing the Black subject against notions of race and explore metaphors for mythology, way-finding and liberation. Critically acclaimed curatorial projects such as American Beauty at Susan Inglett Gallery in 2013 and Black Pulp! touring nationally between 2016-2018 explore the intersections of politics, history and art. Villalongo is the recipient of the prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptor's Grant. His work is included in several notable collections including the Studio Museum In Harlem, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and Princeton University Art Museum, El Museo del Barrio and Denver Art Museum. His work has been reviewed in Art In America, The New Yorker and the New York Times. The artist is currently represented by Susan Inglett Gallery, New York and is an Associate Professor at The Cooper Union School of Art. Villalongo is currently in residence at the American Academy in Rome as the 2022 Jules Guerin & Harold M. English Rome Prize Fellow in Visual Art.
For more information, please visit his website.
William Villalongo
Specimen
2023
21" x 21". Stenciled linen pulp paint on black cotton base sheet, or black cotton with black abaca layered on top, with collaged inkjet prints. Edition of 20.
$4000.00
Specimen incorporates stencil and paper collage. Titled after the circular format of the work it recalls the feeling of looking into a petri dish, microscope or telescope. Concerned with evolving ways to visualize Black being beyond the surface of skin, Villalongo's figures exist as a collection of images and plant-like forms held together by a symbiotic relationship which connects ideas of migration, healing, beauty born of pressure and deep time to the Black body. Among this storm of particles emerge human eyes and limbs seemingly appearing and disappearing. In this way Specimen reflects on an orientation of seeing, perhaps the scrutiny with which Black presence is often subject to or conversely a lens portal onto a constellation of Black being. Whether micro or macro it is a meditation on vastness, an escape from limited thinking.
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