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NEA Grant for Myths and Migrations

POSTED ON: February 27, 2025

Myths and Migrations exhibition

Installation view of William Villalongo: Myths & Migrations at Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, May 3 to August 11, 2024. This exhibition is organized by the Grinnell College Museum of Art. Photo: Andrew Rogers Courtesy of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin, and Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC.

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia recently announced that it was selected to receive a National Endowment for Arts (NEA) Grants for Arts Projects award in support of its upcoming solo exhibition by William Villalongo A'99, associate professor in The Cooper Union’s School of Art. William Villalongo: Myths and Migrations features 20 years of work by the New York-based artist, including figural and narrative paintings, works on paper, and sculpture that incorporate flocking, cut paper, and collage.

PAFA is one of 1,127 awardees to receive a Grants for Arts Projects award, part of the $36.8 million in funding awarded nationwide this year by the NEA. A statement by the academy describes Myths and Migrations as “an innovative exhibition that embodies PAFA’s commitment to fostering the intersection of art, culture, and community engagement.”

Villalongo's work is currently on view through May 3, 2025, as part of Reverberations: Lineages in Design History, a group exhibition at the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York. The exhibition transforms the gallery into an expansive educational space, reimagining design history to feature Indigenous, Black, and People of Color designers and cultural figures.

Villalongo’s practice is informed by research in the natural and social sciences, mythologies and folklore, popular culture imagery, and the history of art—particularly African objects and their appropriation in Euro-American art movements—exploring invisibility and revelation of Black presence against the backdrop of race. Bodies, objects, and interstitial spaces in Villalongo’s work help navigate ideas about seeing and being seen, while also connecting contemporary concepts of presence and erasure with their antecedents through time and across cultures.

In 2021, the Cooper alumnus was a recipient of the Rome Prize in the visual arts, awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His 2023 solo exhibition Black Menagerie was presented by Susan Inglett Gallery, and his work is included in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others.

William Villalongo: Myths and Migrations will be on view from May 15 to August 25, 2025 in the Fisher Brooks Gallery of PAFA’s Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building at 128 N. Broad Street, Philadelphia.

More News from The Cooper Union

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.