William Pope.L

Born 1955 in Newark/NJ, lives and works in Lewiston/ME



www.theblackfactory.com
www.distributingmartin.com

Galleries:
The Project – Los Angeles/New York
Kenny Schachter Rove, London
Catherine Bastide, Brüssel



In his eccentric trailblazing work, William Pope.L has consistently used and transformed willful buffoonery and carnivalesque spectacle, including sideshows, freak shows, enticing signage, costumes, masks, and marvelous feats of derring-do. For The Great White Way, one of several daring and provocative street performances Pope.L has devised through the years, he intermittently crawled up New York City’s Broadway over five years, wearing a Superman suit with a skateboard strapped to his back. In the video of this action, he is a wacky, antic figure, but one evincing real suffering, endurance and resistance. He also confronts and upends a great host of assumptions and power relations predicated on race: a black man in superhero garb (worn by a fantasy figure who is the most powerful white man of all) inching his way by choice up a famous New York City street which is also called The Great White Way. Pope.L’s installation featuring this video, which includes an enigmatic glass of water and carefully calibrated sight lines and dimensions, reveals the ingenuity and formal precision that the artist consistently brings to his works.

William Pope.L’s video installation is wonderfully multi-layered, and this includes his own position as a performer; he is energetic and courageous undertaking his oddball private voyage through a public sphere, but also exposed, vulnerable and isolated, and subject to ridicule and danger. The remarkable thing is how Pope.L’s unflinching, racially charged works are also gleefully absurdist and richly human, evoking aspirations and frailties, connection to and alienation from others, solitude and the conflicted public arena. With works spanning performances, sculptures, videos, and drawings, William Pope.L is a hard-hitting eccentric and also, very likely, one of the most significant American artists of the past several decades.

 

Exhibitions | Bibliography

Exhibitions:
2009: Slightly Unbalanced, Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum, Lafayette/IN
2008: Snow Crawl, Sammlung Falkenberg, Hamburg
2007: Drawing, Dreaming, Drowning, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago/IL
2007: Art After White People: Time, Trees, & Celluloid . . ., Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica/CA

Bibliography:
Intersection (ChainLinks), ed. by Nicole Mauro and Marci Nelligan, texts by Jane Jacobs, Claire Potter, William Pope.L, Mitchell Duneier, and Melissa Ngo, 2008
Gregory Volk, “William Pope.L: Animal Nationalism,” in grandarts.com, September/October 2008
Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, Cambridge/MA 2007 William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America, ed. by Mark H. C. Bessire, Cambridge/MA 2002