William Pope.L

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Pope.L
Born
William Pope

(1955-06-28)June 28, 1955
DiedDecember 23, 2023(2023-12-23) (aged 68)
NationalityAmerican
EducationPratt Institute, Montclair State University, Rutgers University
Known forPerformance Art
PartnerMami Takahashi
Children1

Pope.L (born William Pope; June 28, 1955 – December 23, 2023), also known as William Pope.L, was an American visual artist best known for his work in performance art, and interventionist public art. However, he also produced art in painting, photography, and theater. He was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and was a Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of the Creative Capital Visual Arts Award.[1] Pope.L was also included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial.[2]

Early life and education[edit]

Pope.L was born William Pope in Newark, New Jersey, on June 28, 1955, the second child of William Pope and Lucille Lancaster, and was raised in Keyport, New Jersey and East Village, Manhattan.[3] He attended Pratt Institute from 1973 to 1975 and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program from 1977 to 1978.[4][5] He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Montclair State University, Montclair, New Jersey, in 1978.[4] He received a Master of Fine Arts degree in visual arts from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1981.[6]

Early work[edit]

Tompkins Square Crawl (1991) at the Museum of Modern Art in 2022

From 1990 to 2010, Pope.L was a lecturer of Theater and Rhetoric at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. As a faculty member he directed a production of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin In the Sun, in which he used both African-American and Caucasian actors as members of the same family.

While teaching at Bates, Pope.L's students reportedly coined his pseudonym. The appended "L" was taken from his mother's surname, Lancaster.

For ATM Piece, performed in 1997, he attached himself with an eight-foot length of Italian sausage to the door of a Chase Bank in midtown Manhattan wearing nothing but timberland boots and a skirt made out of U.S. dollar bills.[7]

eRacism, a project that Pope.L began during the late 1970s, included over 40 endurance-based performances consisting of “crawls”, varying in length and duration. In one example titled Tompkins Square Crawl (1991) Pope.L dressed in a business suit and crawled through the gutter in Tompkins Square Park, New York, pushing a potted flower with one hand. Another example titled The Great White Way involved a crawl which stretched over 22 miles and took five years to complete. For this performance he donned a Superman outfit and strapped a skateboard to his back. The crawl stretched the entire 22 miles of Broadway, in New York City.[8] Documentation of this performance was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

2001–2010[edit]

In 2001 the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) advisory renewal panel granted Pope.L $42,000 in financing for a traveling retrospective called "William Pope.L: eRacism". Shortly after announcing the award, the acting chairman, Robert S. Martin, rescinded funding for the grant.[1] Joel Wachs, then president of the Andy Warhol Foundation , stated in the December 21 issue of The New York Times:

"It is important, particularly in light of what I would consider an attack on freedom of expression, to stand firm. We want this exhibition to occur; we want other funders to step forward; we don't want the N.E.A.'s decision to be something that has the effect of stopping what I think is going to be an important exhibition of art."

The Warhol Foundation, in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation and the LEF Foundation, provided $50,000 in funding for the traveling retrospective to tour the United States.[2] eRacism exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art; Diverse Works Artspace, Houston, 2003; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), Oregon, 2003; and Artists Space, New York, 2003.

The catalog "William Pope.L: Friendliest Black Artist in America" was produced by curator Mark Bessire in conjunction with the retrospective exhibition.[9]

In 2002 Pope.L received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award. In 2004 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.[10] In 2005 The Black Factory, an art installation on wheels, traveled from Maine to Missouri as part of The Interventionists show organized by the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MOCA). "Typically the Factory arrives at a city or town and sets up its interactive workshop on the street. People bring objects that represent blackness to them. The Factory’s workers use these objects in tightly rehearsed but loosely performed skits to stimulate a conversation — a flow of ideas, images and experiences. Most objects are photographed and made part of the Factory’s virtual library, some are housed in the Factory’s archive for later use, and some are pulverized in the Factory’s workshop to make new products available in the Factory’s gift shop."[11]

In 2006 he was selected as one of the United States Artists fellows,[12] for which he was awarded a $50,000 unrestricted grant.[13]

Pope.L was featured alongside other performing artists: Sean Penn, Willem Dafoe, Brad Pitt, Steve Buscemi, and Juliette Binoche in Robert Wilson's LAB HD portraits. In 2008, Pope.L's piece "One Substance, Eight Supports, One Situation" was selected to participate in The Renaissance Society's group exhibition, "Black Is, Black Ain't".[14]

In 2010 Pope.L was appointed faculty at the University of Chicago.[15]

Later work[edit]

In 2015 MOCA, Los Angeles presented Trinket,[16] the largest solo museum presentation of Pope.L's work to date. The centerpiece of the show was Trinket, a monumental, custom-made U.S. flag (approximately 54 x 16 feet) hanging on a pole in the middle of the Geffen. During the museum's public hours the flag was continuously blown by four large-scale industrial fans — the type used on Hollywood film sets to create wind or rain effects — and which were illuminated from below by a bank of custom theatrical lights. Over time the flag appeared to fray at its ends due to the constant whipping of the forced air as a metaphor for the rigors and complexities of democratic engagement and participation.[17][18][19][20] Trinket was originally produced in 2008 at Grand Arts, in Kansas City, Missouri, as the centerpiece of Pope.L's exhibition Animal Nationalism.[21]

In 2015 Pope.L produced The Beautiful, a new choreographed crawl performance staged for the first time at Art Basel in Miami Beach.[22] For The Beautiful, four men, dressed as Superman with skateboards strapped to their backs, roll onward in the dark. The rumbling of their wheels grows louder through speakers as they approach the crowd, and blends with the low churning of electric guitars. The ‘Super-Gents’ reach a wooden stage and crab-walk their way up, barely fitting onto the small surface. Holding each other, they finally break into a heart-rending, soulful version of the patriotic song America The Beautiful.[23][24]

In fall 2019, a trio of exhibitions of his work, collectively titled “Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration,” took place in New York City at the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, and the Public Art Fund.[25][26] The first exhibition, "Conquest" was a communal performance piece with 140 participants who crawled on sidewalks for 1.5 mile relay style, over the course of five hours. The performance started in Greenwich Village and ending in Union Square in Manhattan.[27] The exhibition at MoMA, "member: Pope.L, 1978-2001," in|cluded 13 early landmark performance works from the artist. At the Whitney, he created a new piece of work titled "Choir." This room sized installation featured an industrial water tank with sound landscaping from contact microphones on the pipes in the room.[26]

Pope. L is included in the group show Black Melancholia. The exhibition curated by Nana Adusei-Poku includes 28 artists and focuses on the themes of grief and pain.[28]

Personal life and death[edit]

Pope.L was in a relationship with Mami Takahashi until his death in 2023. He also had a son named Desmond Tarkowski-Pope.L.[29]

William Pope.L died in Chicago on December 23, 2023, at the age of 68.[29][30]

Quotes[edit]

Pope.L's art focused on issues of consumption, social class, and masculinity as they relate to race. He is quoted as saying of his own work: “I am a fisherman of social absurdity, if you will… My focus is to politicize disenfranchisement, to make it neut, to reinvent what’s beneath us, to remind us where we all come from.[31]

In his Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship bio, he wrote: "Like the African shaman who chews his pepper seeds and spits seven times into the air, I believe art re-ritualizes the everyday to reveal something fresh about our lives. This revelation is a vitality and it is a power to change the world.".[32]

Selected publications[edit]

  • Pope.L: My Kingdom for a Title. Los Angeles: New Documents. 2021. ISBN 9781953441058
  • member: Pope.L, 1978-2001. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. 2019. ISBN 9781633450868
  • William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 2002. ISBN 9780262025331

References[edit]

  1. ^ "The Black Factory", Creative Capital.
  2. ^ "Whitney Biennial 2017 | Whitney Museum of American Art". whitney.org. Retrieved 2017-02-05.
  3. ^ ""Pope.L, Provocative Performance Artist, Dies at 68". Retrieved 2023-12-28.
  4. ^ a b "Pope.L :: Foundation for Contemporary Arts". www.foundationforcontemporaryarts.org.
  5. ^ Whitney Museum of American Art (29 June 1983). "Independent Study Program : fifteenth anniversary / Whitney Museum of American Art". Whitney Museum of American Art – via Internet Archive.
  6. ^ "William Pope.L - New Members of the University Faculty - The University of Chicago". newfaculty.uchicago.edu.
  7. ^ "Pope.L's ATM Piece". MoMA. Museum of Modern Art. August 11, 2021. Retrieved August 12, 2021.
  8. ^ "Art in America: The art of public disturbance: William Pope.L consistently provokes visceral responses from viewers, especially with his street performances. A traveling survey of his work titled "eRacism" arrives this month in Portland, Ore - Critical Essay". Archived from the original on 2005-02-21. Retrieved 2008-12-03.
  9. ^ Bessire, Mark H.C., William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America, MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts – London, England, 2002
  10. ^ "William Pope.L - John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation". Archived from the original on 2013-05-09. Retrieved 2011-11-09.
  11. ^ "Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis". Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
  12. ^ "William Pope.L - United States Artists". Archived from the original on 2010-09-14. Retrieved 2008-11-06.
  13. ^ "USA Arts Organization - About Us". Archived from the original on 2008-10-25. Retrieved 2008-11-06.
  14. ^ The Renaissance Society Archived 2011-07-20 at the Wayback Machine
  15. ^ "Faculty - Department of Visual Arts". dova.uchicago.edu.
  16. ^ "William Pope.L: Trinket". The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
  17. ^ Knight, Christopher (24 March 2015). "William Pope.L sets the U.S. flag waving at the MOCA/Geffen". Los Angeles Times.
  18. ^ "William Pope.L". artforum.com. 20 February 2015.
  19. ^ "William Pope.L wants to bring down the house - the Art Newspaper". Archived from the original on 2015-09-06. Retrieved 2016-01-16.
  20. ^ [https://web.archive.org/web/20160409054455/http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/william-popel-1/ Archived 2016-04-09 at the Wayback Machine
  21. ^ "Grand Arts". grandarts.com.
  22. ^ Chiaverina, John (3 December 2015). "Muscle Men and Free Cash: Xavier Cha and Pope.L Shine at Art Basel's Public Sector".
  23. ^ "- Pope.L Performance at Art Basel Miami Beach - News - Mitchell-Innes & Nash". www.miandn.com. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
  24. ^ on, Enrico. "VernissageTV Art TV - Pope L.: The Beautiful (2015)". Retrieved 2020-06-10.
  25. ^ "Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration - Pope.L at MoMA, Whitney, Public Art Fund - News - Mitchell-Innes & Nash". www.miandn.com. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
  26. ^ a b Schwendener, Martha (2020-01-09). "What Makes Pope.L's Art Endure? (It's Not the Famous Crawls)". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
  27. ^ Sheets, Hilarie M. (2019-09-22). "Pope.L's Group Crawl: Protest, Pathos, Provocation". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
  28. ^ Cotter, Holland (2022-06-23). "For Black Artists, the Motivating Power of Melancholia". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2022-06-25.
  29. ^ a b Heinrich, Will (December 27, 2023). "Pope.L, Provocative Performance Artist, Dies at 68". The New York Times. Retrieved January 1, 2024.
  30. ^ Pope.L, Daredevil Artist Who Invoked Heady Ideas About Blackness, Dies at 68
  31. ^ Bessire, Mark H.C., William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America, MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts – London, England, 2002.pg.23
  32. ^ "William Pope L. :: Foundation for Contemporary Arts". Archived from the original on 2008-10-18. Retrieved 2008-12-03.

Further reading[edit]

  • The Whole Entire World: Interview with William Pope.L by Amy Horschak in Dak'Art 2006, La Biennale de Dakar: Dakar, 2006, p. 382-383.
  • Pope.L: Showing Up to Withhold, The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL, 2014 (ISBN 978-0-226-20006-4).
  • Simonini, Ross (Dec 2017 – Jan 2018). "An interview with Pope L." The Believer. 14 (3): 87–92.

External links[edit]