WILLIAM VILLALONGO
Adjunct Instructor

"Good Fortune or The Early Bird Gets The Worm," cut paper and acrylic on velvet, 72" x 48", 2004
(click on image for larger view)

William Villalongo is an artist who primarily works with painting and drawing, but also has employed performance, video and wall installation to investigate concepts within his paintings. Villalongo repurposes the languages of Western mythological and romantic painting, kitsch and science fiction in order to reveal visions of a mutating personal and African American identity.

"I am constantly reacting to the disparate information that I encounter, wanting to bring it all together somehow in order to reveal instances where personal and cultural identity share the same stage with nature, history and fantasy. My goal as an artist is an insistence on the entanglement of these ideas. I revel in the contradiction and absurdity that is produced, because I feel it pushes at the seams of a binary world view and places the idea of the self in a state of mutation."

He has exhibited work at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Villalongo has attended the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Marie Walshe Sharpe and Studio Museum in Harlem artist residencies. Permanent collections holding his work include the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Norton Family Foundation. His work has been reviewed in Time Out, The New York Times, The New York Sun and International Review of African American Art.

Villalongo received his BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art and his MFA from Tyler School of Art. He has been a Visiting Artist at Vermont College and San Diego State University and has taught at the University of Connecticut, Tyler School of Art and Middlebury College. He currently teaches Drawing I at The Cooper Union.

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