Through inventive visual strategies and sensuous materials, William Villalongo’s work comments on the Black experience. Beautiful Boys depicts a figure camouflaged by black velour cutout shapes and collaged images of gemstones, leaves, African and ancient Greek sculptures, and butterflies. As Villalongo explains, “I am transplanting the inherent and persistent fragility that surrounds Black life within the symbolic languages of healing, power, [and] metamorphic and geologic transformation. The works are embedded with images of crystals, meteorites, butterflies, and African sculpture. I believe this speaks to notions of liberation and remembrance in the afterlives of extraction and migration.”

The array of swirling historical artifacts and natural elements is bounded within painted body parts—arms, hands, and a tied cloth or durag indicating the figure’s head—to suggest the form’s navigation of the world through various states of alteration and transformation. Villalongo hopes his work “conveys something of the precarity of life itself and how we are all implicated in the struggles of others. This is not about pain. It’s about love. It’s about recognizing that we are more than flesh, that we hold and release time and histories.”

William Villalongo (born 1975), Beautiful Boys. Acrylic, cut velour paper, and pigment print collage, 2019. 70 × 39 7/8 in. (177.8 × 101.3 cm). William J. Hitchcock Fund in memory of Grace J. Hitchcock, 2019.58. Not on view.

Image Description: A vertical, rectangular collaged image on a black background showing the half-length shape of a body, including arms and hands, with dark skin and a cloth wrap indicating the head. In place of the rest of the body is a network of white leaves and vines interspersed with images of sculptures, various kinds of butterflies, and chunks of quartz and other stones.