Freddy Villalobos

Freddy Villalobos’s installation waiting for the stone to speak, for I know nothing of aventure (2025) is a meditation on the ways in which death and memory are mapped onto urban space, specifically the north–south route of Figueroa Street in Los Angeles. Video footage taken by Villalobos maps a route down Figueroa, from the LA hotel where in 1964 the thirty-three-year-old soul singer Sam Cooke was shot and killed to the morgue where his body was taken. Neon letters spell out the phrase “’til somebody loves you”—a reference to Cooke’s cover of the crooner standard “You’re Nobody Til Somebody Loves You.” By evoking Figueroa in the era of Cooke using images of the street as it appears today, Villalobos suggests that the racial tensions and demographic shifts of the 1960s continue to reverberate, a point emphasized by the accompanying soundtrack, which is slowed and filtered, with only the low ends audible. Villalobos uses distortion, vibration, and repetition to conjure both presence and absence, transforming Figueroa from a corridor marked by complex legacies of violence into a temporal site where history, daily life, and imminent futures converge.

Freddy Villalobos was born in 1989 in Los Angeles. He is an interdisciplinary artist whose work interrogates states of vulnerability, disruption, and becoming. Solo and two-person exhibitions include International Waters, Brooklyn (2021); Mandujano Cell, Inglewood, CA (2018); and Catalyst Gallery, University of California, Irvine (2015). Group exhibitions include International Objects, Brooklyn (2023); White Cube, London (2021); Green Hall Gallery, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT (2021, 2020, 2019); Vincent Price Art Museum, East Los Angeles College, Monterey Park, CA (2018, 2017); CB1 Gallery, Los Angeles (2017); Human Resources, Los Angeles (2017); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2017); Underground Museum, Los Angeles (2017); and the University Art Gallery, University of California, Irvine (2016). He is the recipient of honors and awards including a Shandaken Governors Island Project Residency, New York (2023); a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME (2022); the AIM Fellowship, Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY (2022); and a Graduate and Professional School Research Fellowship, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT (2021). Villalobos earned a BA at the University of California, Irvine (2016), and an MFA at Yale University, New Haven, CT (2021).