William Villalongo, Resident Artist Lecture 2026

William Villalongo gives a lecture at Skowhegan talking about his interdisciplinary practice which spans painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, work with black velvet cut paper, and curatorial practice. In his work, Willalongo continually comes back to visibility in the Black subject over many iterations, encompassing notions of cultural erasure, contested histories, and healing. Villalongo’s practice is material, and he formally fights with painting as a model for seeing. Villalongo is concerned with the absorption and reflection of light, anthropomorphism, natural and celestial formations, fragmentations, obscurity, and mythmaking. Villalongo’s interdisciplinary work seeks to question the Black presence as something simultaneously hyper visible and in constant danger of erasure. Villalongo thinks about bodies as holding histories across time, as malleable entities, as forms that can vanish and recollect themselves, that can traverse geographies and transplant themselves as a form of resistance, and how bodies are also sites of healing and liberation. Ultimately, Villalongo will always grapple with how to create work about the body without the body being present as an issue at the heart of his work.