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WILLIAM VILLALONGO
STICKS & STONES | SUSAN INGLETT GALLERY -
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WILLIAM VILLALONGO, Mother Tongue, 2020
Susan Inglett Gallery is pleased to present WILLIAM VILLALONGO Sticks & Stones, from 21 January through 6 March 2021.
Furthering his signature cut-paper and collage technique, Villalongo explores how to best represent the Black subject against the backdrop of race in America. Here, he defines anatomies through collaged images of geologic forms, meteorites, butterflies, drinking gourds, and African sculpture interspersed with leafy cut-outs. These combined images create a portrait from ecological and cultural histories, emphasizing diaspora, deep time, freedom, beauty, and transformation. Drawing parallels to natural metamorphosis, Villalongo suggests an evolution of Black identity—a caterpillar enters a chrysalis, emerging later as a butterfly or rocks, compressed over millennia, transforming into stunning crystals. By collapsing time and space through earthly and cosmic imagery, the artist calls attention to the fluctuating role of the Black figure. He studies and transmutes the Black image, underscoring liminality and transformation through his living motifs.
Materializing from Villalongo’s black velvet cut-outs, Black and Brown skin, eyes, and appendages intermittently appear, swirling alongside turbulent incisions and collaged elements to form the disembodied figure. The texture of the artist's characteristic velvet reinforces the experience and sensation of spirits rising from extreme darkness, confronting conditions of their visibility. The resulting scene interrogates the tentative space held by the Black body in contemporary society and throughout history and art, balancing loss and agency over the Black self-image. Keenly aware of the limitations of skin color as a progenitor of meaning around the Black subject, the artist engages with strategic use of imagery and activity to create a context for seeing and understanding. Combining these dynamic components — both corporeal and from another world — Villalongo powerfully conveys the experience of the Black diaspora in the past and present while celebrating Black identity.
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From African-American folk songs to the funk music of Afrofuturism, Villalongo has long been guided by music in creating his works. The following playlist includes music from a variety of genres and periods that inspired his new body of work, such as Parliament's Mothership Connection to the folk song, Follow the Drinking Gourd.
"I've been interested in how music, and particularly Black musicians, have thought about the invisible force of music made sentient through the body via dance, protest, and acts of resistance for my entire career."
- William Villalongo
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THE MOTHERSHIP CONNECTION
2020This large-scale diptych takes its title from the 1975 Parliament album of the same name. The record is one of the first to explore George Clinton's P-Funk mythology, in which he envisions a celestial, Space Age-inspired realm of resiliency and enlightenment for African Americans. In the title track of the album, Clinton introduces himself as the Mothership connection, bringing forth an environment of funk and dance. Parliament's Mothership Connection has since become a cornerstone of Afrofuturism, an aesthetic and philosophy that marks the intersection of the African diaspora with technology.
Villalongo's Mothership Connection presents two images: at left, the silhouette of a slave ship; at right, a disembodied figure both emerging from and diving into the darkness. The celestial and earthly are bound together through the imagery of historical violence and its repercussions in the present. Referencing scholar Christina Sharpe's In the Wake, the slave vessel recalls the tragic history of the Middle Passage for enslaved Africans and its mark— or the "wake" of these voyages— on the contemporary African diaspora. In particular, Villalongo highlights not just the systemic racism and trauma resulting from slavery but how this experience informs African-American cultural traditions, remembrance, and ancestry.
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William Villalongo, Follow Me, 2020
FOLLOW ME
2020Throughout the series, Villalongo incorporates bright drinking gourds into his characteristic collaged forms. This visual motif references the phrase and the title of the folk song, Follow the Drinking Gourd. For enslaved people who escaped via the Underground Railroad, they looked up to the “drinking gourd,” or the Ursa Major/Big Dipper constellation, as a guide leading them north. The North Star can be found by looking up and to the right from the "spout" of the constellation, serving as a compass. The conductors of the Underground Railroad also sang the folk tune while assisting slaves on their journey to freedom.
In the piece Follow Me, the drinking gourds— found in natural tones as well as bright primary colors— make up Villalongo’s disembodied Black body. Radiating outwards from the figure’s head, the collaged gourds join images of crystals and cut-paper leaves, adding to the metaphor of metamorphosis. In connecting the image of the drinking gourd to its history with the Underground Railroad, the artist binds the celestial and the corporeal to demonstrate the lived experience of the Black diaspora in both the past and present.
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William Villalongo, A Seed is a Star, 2020
In myself I do contain
The elements of sun and rain
First a seed with roots that swell
I gradually burst through my shell
Pushing down into the ground
The root of me is homeward bound
A trunk, a leaf and there I am
A miracle of least by far- Stevie Wonder, A Seed is a Star/Tree Medley
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STICKS AND STONES
2020
The title of Villalongo's solo exhibition originates from two works, Sticks and Stones, videos encased in drinking gourds flocked in black velvet. The video Sticks shows the artist from behind staring off towards the Atlantic at sunset while its counterpart, Stones, is shot along the shores of Port Royal Sound near Beaufort, SC. These intracoastal waterways were instrumental to the American slave trade, and, as a result, a battleground in the Civil War. The Union eventually occupied the forts near Port Royal Sound for almost five years, allowing the region to become a hub for reformist ideas: it is where the Emancipation Proclamation was first read in public, while philosophies formulated there provided the building blocks for the Reconstruction Era in the 1870s.Visiting Port Royal Sound, Villalongo took note of the small black rocks that populated the beach, shown in the video of Stones. "They look like many of the minerals I've used in the works on paper," he explained. "In my mind, they are black souls drifted ashore from the deep. If the gourds are about the navigation of black bodies then together, they are a look back and a look at a history that is mostly unimaginable." -
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William Villalongo, Float like a Butterfly, Sting like a Bee, 2020
FLOAT LIKE A BUTTERFLY, STING LIKE A BEE
2020Float like a Butterfly, Sting like a Bee contrasts Western and African notions of male beauty, masculinity, and power. Here, Villalongo presents a visual collision within the figure incorporating images of Michelangelo's David alongside power figures from many African cultures. The Renaissance marble sculpture, set against the black velvet background, stands out in its stark whiteness. Each artist represents power in ways specific to their respective culture. Michelangelo's David relays the parable of David and Goliath, an example of heart and courage prevailing over physical strength. The "power figures," found in a number of African cultures, are thought to contain great spiritual and healing powers.
These interpretations of power, taken from both Western art history and the African diaspora, connect with the Muhammad Ali quote found in the title of Villalongo's work. Images of bees and butterflies join sculptural icons to form the body, while the head is demarcated by a boxing helmet. Three-dimensional drinking gourds, strung together with beads and flocked in black velvet and glitter, are clasped firm in hand. "Muhammad Ali's quote is also about strength and wisdom in life as much as it encapsulates his boxing strategy," says Villalongo. "For Black people, it works well as a life lesson. For me, it's also another instance where cycles of nature and pollination are used as metaphors for resilience and grace under pressure. I make these contrasts to remind the viewer that we are more the same than different."
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William Villalongo, Black Metamorphosis 1452, 2020
Black Metamorphosis 1452
2020Black Metamorphosis 1452 directly references scholarship by writer Sylvia Wynter and geologist Kathryn Yusoff. In Wynter’s text Black Metamorphosis, she emphasizes the year 1452 as perhaps a more important date in marking the so-called New World, as this was the year African slaves were first transported to the sugar plantations of Madeira off the coast of Portugal. Yusoff applies Wynter’s timeline in her recent publication, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, as a starting place for unearthing the buried histories of colonial trade and slavery. In a physiological sense, the kinetic activity of the metamorphosis speaks to the constant trade between Africa, Europe, and the Americas and, most importantly, the slavery and exploitation of African people that underpinned Euro-American freedoms and made colonial expansion possible.
From the swirling, overlapping chaos of butterflies and vines, a human form emerges, one that is literally grounded in African sculpture. Here, the cut-outs and collaged elements are balanced on the seat of a Luba fertility stool, a figure carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders. By affixing the image to this particular piece, Villalongo adds yet another layer of meaning suggesting "the precarity of life itself and how we are all implicated in the struggles of others."
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Photo: Argenis Apolinario, NYC
WILLIAM VILLALONGO (b. 1975, Hollywood, FL) was raised Bridgeton, NJ and now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received his B.F.A. from The Cooper Union School of Art, NYC and his M.F.A. from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia. Recent exhibitions include Yesterday’s Tomorrow: Selections from the Rose Collection, 1933-2018 at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; Living in America, curated by Assembly Room, at the International Print Center, NYC; Afrocosmologies: American Reflections, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Young, Gifted, and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art, OSilas Gallery, Concordia College, Bronxville, NY, travelling to Lehman College Art Gallery, Lehman College, Bronx, NY; New Mythologies: William Villalongo, The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts and Culture, Charlotte, NC; Greater New York, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; and the online exhibition, Life During Wartime, curated by Christian Viveros-Fauné, University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL, among others. In 2023, Villalongo will have a solo museum exhibition originating at the Grinnell College Museum of Art, Grinnell, IA. He is the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptor's Grant. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum; Grinnell College Museum of Art, Grinnell, IA; Princeton University Art Museum; the Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC; the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, among others. Villalongo is an Associate Professor at The Cooper Union School of Art, NYC.
WILLIAM VILLALONGO: Sticks & Stones
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