Resident Faculty Lecture:
William Villalongo
Type
Lecture
Series
Barbara Lee Lecture Series
Location
Old Dominion Fresco Barn
Skowhegan Campus
39 Art School Rd
Madison, ME 04950
Date
7:30 PM
Related from The Library
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William Villalongo, A Dance for Dave, 2023. Acrylic, velvet flocking and paper collage on wood panel. Photo: Massey Photography
William Villalongo, Beacon, 2022. Multimedia Installation at Villa Romana, Florence, Italy. Courtesy the artist.
William Villalongo. Photo: Argenis Apollinario Photography (c) Villalongo Studio LLC
1 of 3
William Villalongo, A Dance for Dave, 2023. Acrylic, velvet flocking and paper collage on wood panel. Photo: Massey Photography
William Villalongo, Beacon, 2022. Multimedia Installation at Villa Romana, Florence, Italy. Courtesy the artist.
William Villalongo. Photo: Argenis Apollinario Photography (c) Villalongo Studio LLC
William Villalongo joins us for our Barbara Lee Lecture Series, with a talk titled “Seeing in the Dark.” William Villalongo makes paintings, collage and sculpture concerned with representing the Black subject exploring themes of myth, migration and healing. His notable curatorial project Black Pulp! toured nationally between 2016-2018 exploring intersections of politics, history and art.
As the 2022 Jules Guerin & Harold M. English Rome Prize Fellow in Visual Art, Villalongo did extensive research on the Black presence in antiquity culminating in a body of work titled Black Menagerie included in his 20 year survey Myths and Migrations which toured nationally between 2024-2025. His recent collaborative work with Urbanist Shraddha Ramani and Nell Irvin Painter reimagines historical infographics on Black life in America by W.E.B. Du Bois for the 21st century posing difficult questions about notions of progress and resistance in the face of persistent cultural erasure.
About the artist:
William Villalongo was born in 1975 in Hollywood, Florida and lives in Brooklyn, New York. 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 in 2002. He writes about his practice: “In recent work, I am transplanting the inherent and persistent fragility that surrounds Black life within the symbolic languages of healing, power, metamorphic and geologic transformation. The works are embedded with images of crystals, meteorites, butterflies and African sculpture. This is a growing lexicon of images that infuse the space of the body. A central question I ask in my work is how do we see the Black subject without the body present. How do we see ourselves beyond flesh? The work intends to speak to notions of liberation and remembrance in the afterlives of extraction and migration.”
About The Barbara Lee Lecture Series:
The Barbara Lee Lecture Series is an annual series that features faculty artists during our summer program. During this series, we open our campus to the public, welcoming our friends and neighbors into the conversations that take place at the School. After the summer program, the lectures become part of the Lecture Archive, a growing collection of recordings that can be accessed online or on request.
