William Villalongo (born 1975) is an American artist working in

painting Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and ...

printmaking Printmaking is the process of creating artworks by printing, normally on paper, but also on fabric, wood, metal, and other surfaces. "Traditional printmaking" normally covers only the process of creating prints using a hand processed techniq ...

sculpture Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Sculpture is the three-dimensional art work which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable sc ...

, and

installation art Installation art is an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called ...

. Based in

Brooklyn, New York Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

, Villalongo is an associate professor at the

Cooper Union School of Art The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (Cooper Union) is a private college at Cooper Square in New York City. Peter Cooper founded the institution in 1859 after learning about the government-supported École Polytechnique in ...

in New York.

Early life and education

Villalongo was born in

Hollywood, Florida Hollywood is a city in southern Broward County, Florida, United States, located between Fort Lauderdale and Miami. As of July 1, 2019, Hollywood had a population of 154,817. Founded in 1925, the city grew rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s, and is now ...

, to a Puerto Rican father and African-American mother. His parents separated when he was a young child and he was raised in

Bridgeton, New Jersey Bridgeton is a city in Cumberland County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It is the county seat of Cumberland County Villalongo received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from

The Cooper Union The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (Cooper Union) is a private college at Cooper Square in New York City. Peter Cooper founded the institution in 1859 after learning about the government-supported École Polytechnique in ...

for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1999. He furthered his education by receiving his Masters of Fine Art from the

Tyler School of Art The Tyler School of Art and Architecture is based at Temple University, a large, urban, public research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Tyler currently enrolls about 1,350 undergraduate students and about 200 graduate students in a wid ...

Temple University Temple University (Temple or TU) is a public state-related research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1884 by the Baptist minister Russell Conwell and his congregation Grace Baptist Church of Philadelphia then called Ba ...

in 2001.

Influences

Villallongo’s work typically focuses on the politics of historical erasure, with a particular focus on the artistic reassessment of Western, American, and African Art histories. The artist states that his intention toward these reassessments evolves in part from the West's histories of "taking African art objects and placing them on the side of the sofa to decorate, although that is not their purpose. We are obsessed with fitting a narrative, a story." His work engages with the black body, examining the influence of socialization, history, dress and speech. Commenting on his reexamination of the power dynamics of history and representation, Villalongo has posited, " he relationship isproblematic and interesting, and I wanted to think about how to use it and tell a story." In many of the artist's portraits, bodies emerge from "a tumult of white negative space cut out of black velour paper," in ways that evoke leaves, branches, feathers, or slashes.

Professional career

Villalongo has exhibited throughout the United States. His solo exhibitions include the

University of Connecticut The University of Connecticut (UConn) is a public land-grant research university in Storrs, Connecticut, a village in the town of Mansfield. The primary 4,400-acre (17.8 km2) campus is in Storrs, approximately a half hour's drive from Hart ...

Contemporary Art Galleries; Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at University of the Arts Philadelphia; Scarfone-Hartley Gallery at the University of Tampa, Florida, and the

Harvey B. Gantt Center The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, formerly known as the Afro-American Cultural Center, is in Charlotte, North Carolina and named for Harvey Gantt, the city's first African-American mayor and the first African-American ...

for African-American Arts and Culture in

Charlotte, North Carolina Charlotte ( ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of North Carolina. Located in the Piedmont region, it is the county seat of Mecklenburg County. The population was 874,579 at the 2020 census, making Charlotte the 16th-most populo ...

. His work was included in a major gift to the permanent collection of the

Studio Museum in Harlem The Studio Museum in Harlem is an American art museum devoted to the work of artists of African descent. The museum's galleries are currently closed in preparation for a building project that will replace the current building, located at 144 W ...

in 2018 by collector Peggy Cooper Cafritz. Villalongo is one of 42 artists who contributed works to a record-setting

Sotheby's Sotheby's () is a British-founded American multinational corporation with headquarters in New York City. It is one of the world's largest brokers of fine and decorative art, jewellery, and collectibles. It has 80 locations in 40 countries, and ...

auction in support of the construction of a new building for the Studio Museum, to be located on 125th Street. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at

El Museo del Barrio El Museo del Barrio, often known simply as El Museo (the museum), is a museum at 1230 Fifth Avenue in Upper Manhattan, New York City. It is located near the northern end of Fifth Avenue's Museum Mile, immediately north of the Museum of the Cit ...

in New York City; the

Weatherspoon Art Museum The Weatherspoon Art Museum is located at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is one of the largest collections of modern and contemporary art in the southeast with a focus on American art. Its programming includes fifteen or more e ...

in Greensboro, North Carolina; the

Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make these i ...

; and, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York City. The artist’s work can be found in collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts;

Princeton University Art Museum The Princeton University Art Museum (PUAM) is the Princeton University gallery of art, located in Princeton, New Jersey. With a collecting history that began in 1755, the museum was formally established in 1882, and now houses over 113,000 works o ...

; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University;

, NYC; Toledo Museum of Art; Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro;

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...

; and the Yale University Art Gallery among others. He has also had work published in '' ESOPUS'' 22. Villalongo has completed residencies at

Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture is an artists residency located in Madison, Maine, just outside of Skowhegan. Every year, the program accepts online applications from emerging artists from November through January, and selects 65 t ...

; The

, New York; Studio-f at the University of Tampa,

Florida Florida is a state located in the Southeastern region of the United States. Florida is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the northwest by Alabama, to the north by Georgia, to the east by the Bahamas and Atlantic Ocean, and to ...

; the Hermitage Artist Retreat; and, the Fountainhead in Miami, Florida. He is represented by Susan Inglett Gallery, New York.

Curatorial work: ''Black Pulp!''

In 2016, Villalongo co-curated ''Black Pulp!'', a traveling exhibition of nearly a century's worth of Black image production by Black publishers, Black artists and by non-Black artists, with fellow artist

Mark Thomas Gibson Mark Thomas Gibson (born 1980, Miami, Miami, FL) is an American visual artist working in painting, print, ink, and watercolor. Gibson's work explores Black representation in the United States using the medium of comics. Education Gibson received ...

. The exhibition was named for

pulp Pulp may refer to: * Pulp (fruit), the inner flesh of fruit Engineering * Dissolving pulp, highly purified cellulose used in fibre and film manufacture * Pulp (paper), the fibrous material used to make paper * Molded pulp, a packaging material * ...

, a cheap paper that was used to inexpensively print newspapers, books, leaflets, and other printed ephemera in the 19th and 20th centuries and consequently made mass communication possible. During these centuries, the images of African-Americans that appeared in pulp publications produced and distributed by white Americans were often racist. As a consequence, "black pulp" was used by black communities to combat these racist portrayals and to facilitate communication within and about black identity. ''Black Pulp!'' presented black pulp media from the Harlem Renaissance and its succeeding decades that offered up "windows into the darker, erotic, satirical, and more absurd recesses of the Black popular imagination; while underscoring important debates around personhood and identity." The collection of works, wrote William Villalongo in the exhibition's catalogue, "highlight dhistorical efforts within the medium to rebuff derogatory image culture with exceptional wit, beauty, and humor, to provide emerging, nuanced perspective on black humanity." In a 2016 interview for

The Huffington Post ''HuffPost'' (formerly ''The Huffington Post'' until 2017 and sometimes abbreviated ''HuffPo'') is an American progressive news website, with localized and international editions. The site offers news, satire, blogs, and original content, and ...

, Villalongo expressed his hope that the exhibition would allow people to "see an expanded view of the Black subject in general, but also the complex and immense challenge of historical efforts of Black folk to own and steward their own image."'''' A large portion of the historical works and print media displayed in the exhibition came from collections at the

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is a research library of the New York Public Library (NYPL) and an archive repository for information on people of African descent worldwide. Located at 515 Malcolm X Boulevard (Lenox Avenue) b ...

, the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is ...

, the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at

Emory University Emory University is a private research university in Atlanta, Georgia. Founded in 1836 as "Emory College" by the Methodist Episcopal Church and named in honor of Methodist bishop John Emory, Emory is the second-oldest private institution of ...

EBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became a ...

, and the personal collections of Villalongo and Gibson. ''Black Pulp!'' garnered critical attention, particularly because of its focus and attention to black experience and identity.

Awards

* 2005, Louis Comfort Tiffany Award * 2006, Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptor's Grant * 2021-2022, American Academy in Rome Fellow

References

External links

William Villalongo
{{DEFAULTSORT:Villalongo, William African-American artists American artists Hispanic and Latino American artists