Villallongo’s work typically focuses on the politics of historical erasure, with a particular focus on the artistic reassessment of Western, American, and African Art histories. The artist states that his intention toward these reassessments evolves in part from the West's histories of "taking African art objects and placing them on the side of the sofa to decorate, although that is not their purpose. We are obsessed with fitting a narrative, a story." His work engages with the black body, examining the influence of socialization, history, dress and speech. Commenting on his reexamination of the power dynamics of history and representation, Villalongo has posited, " problematic and interesting, and I wanted to think about how to use it and tell a story." In many of the artist's portraits, bodies emerge from "a tumult of white negative space cut out of black velour paper," in ways that evoke leaves, branches, feathers, or slashes.
In 2016, Villalongo co-curated Black Pulp!, a traveling exhibition of nearly a century's worth of Black image production by Black publishers, Black artists and by non-Black artists, with fellow artist Mark Thomas Gibson. The exhibition was named for pulp, a cheap paper that was used to inexpensively print newspapers, books, leaflets, and other printed ephemera in the 19th and 20th centuries and consequently made mass communication possible. During these centuries, the images of African-Americans that appeared in pulp publications produced and distributed by white Americans were often racist. As a consequence, "black pulp" was used by black communities to combat these racist portrayals and to facilitate communication within and about black identity. Black Pulp! presented black pulp media from the Harlem Renaissance and its succeeding decades that offered up "windows into the darker, erotic, satirical, and more absurd recesses of the Black popular imagination; while underscoring important debates around personhood and identity." The collection of works, wrote William Villalongo in the exhibition's catalogue, "highlight historical efforts within the medium to rebuff derogatory image culture with exceptional wit, beauty, and humor, to provide emerging, nuanced perspective on black humanity." In a 2016 interview for The Huffington Post, Villalongo expressed his hope that the exhibition would allow people to "see an expanded view of the Black subject in general, but also the complex and immense challenge of historical efforts of Black folk to own and steward their own image." A large portion of the historical works and print media displayed in the exhibition came from collections at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Library of Congress, the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University, EBay, and the personal collections of Villalongo and Gibson. Black Pulp! garnered critical attention, particularly because of its focus and attention to black experience and identity.
