William Villalongo

William Villalongo was born in 1975 in Hollywood, FL and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He is an Assistant Professor at The Cooper Union School of Art where he also received his BFA. Villalongo received his MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University.

Villalongo explores themes of love, empathy, and renewal, and often uses references to traditional African masks and Renaissance perspective in his work to orchestrate a conversation between history and art. Villalongo’s recent work offers a meaningful contradiction of reality as an intervention into the storied and most commonly difficult histories at the roots of modernism, modern painting, and the race and gender-based assumptions related to them.

The artist is most recognizable from his cut outs from black velour paper. Regarding his work at Graphicstudio, Villalongo explains, “Palimpsest combines silkscreen, puff ink, aquatint and laser cut. The texture of the background is layers of silkscreened ink and puff ink. The plates were made by rubbing asphalt road, sidewalks and manhole covers with crayon onto mylar. I wanted the print to invert the ground to the wall. This becomes the background for two bodies floating through an image of hoodies. These rather banal garments have become a foil to suggest potential violence when worn on black bodies and in recent times a symbol of protest to that mindset. The two prints Palimpsest and Embodied suggest the longer trajectory of this racial imaginary that has been going on far longer than our current moment often ending in violence. However, our current cultural discourse speculates on these patterns of problematic reasoning and actions as debatable despite an overwhelming record. Palimpsest is about that record and the abstraction that develops around black lives as a result of this cycle of violence, protest and erasure. I want to suggest the body as an abstraction, one of resiliency and flux that rewrites itself as it moves through the world. One that embraces visibility and invisibility as a condition of being.”

Villalongo has exhibited extensively with recent appearances in Woke! William Villalongo and Mark Thomas Gibson at the USF Contemporary Art Museum, and was the co-curator with Gibson of the exhibition Black Pulp! Villalongo is the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. His work has been held in the collections of The Studio Museum in Harlem, MoMA PS1, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, The Weatherspoon Museum, and The Whitney Museum of American Art. He is represented by Susan Inglett Gallery, New York and has been reviewed by Artforum, ARTnews, The New York Times, and The Brooklyn Rai, among others.

 

Further Resources

Artist's Site: villalongostudio.com

Printmaking + Sculpture Terms

Printmaking Glossary

Sculpture Glossary

Sales

For sales, or more information about an edition, please contact Graphicstudio at (813) 974-3503 or gsoffice@usf.edu.

Copyright + Reproduction

Images of the artwork are jointly owned by the artist and Graphicstudio. Reproduction of any kind including electronic media must be expressly approved by Graphicstudio.