William Villalongo is a revisionist. In painting, sculpture and cut paper, the artist lays bare our collective history, mythology, folklore, and religion for review and reprisal. Reordering this massive jumble, Villalongo assigns a voice and a presence to those marginalized or overlooked in the original telling. “Eden’s Remix” begins at the beginning as the story goes, as the first Man and Woman are cast from Paradise after eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Masaccio’s “Expulsion from the Garden of Eden” provides the template for these collages and three dimensional cutouts, as Adam and Eve take their first tentative steps into a now uncertain and precarious future. Casting about through history Villalongo imagines the roles of Adam and Eve as played by Barack Obama and Nefertiti, Dred Scot and Susan B. Anthony, or Stokely Carmichael and Gloria Steinem respectively. In re-imagining or re-imaging our past, Villalongo re-imagines a brighter future.
William Villalongo’s work first appeared in the seminal “Frequency” exhibition at the Studio Museum Harlem, followed by an appearance in P.S. 1’s “Greater New York”. He is the recipient of the prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painter’s and Sculptor’s Grant. A graduate of Cooper Union, Villalongo received his MFA from Temple University. He is represented by the Susan Inglett Gallery, New York.
