William Pope.L, The Great White Way, 22 miles, 9 years, 1 street, 2001-ongoing, New York, Photo Credit: Pruznick/Grey. |
Elections and Democracy in the Oeuvre of William Pope L. |
William Pope.L, The Great White Way, 22 miles, 9 years, 1 street, 2001-ongoing, New York, Photo Credit: Pruznick/Grey.
William Pope.L, Eating the Wall Street Journal, 2000.
William Pope.L, Pop Tart of Evil, moldy toaster pastry on display at Volta.
William Pope.L, Image used to promote eRacism exhibition.
Cover of William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America. |
Grand Arts "The danger in any democratic effort is that the energy which keeps it aloft will die. What’s important is that somebody picks it back up again." —William Pope.L on Trinket Animal Nationalism is comprised of two works: Trinket, a large-scale, publicly accessible installation at the Exhibition Hall at the Municipal Auditorium, Kansas City Convention Center, and a video and performance piece titled Small Cup at Grand Arts. Timed to coincide with the run-up to the United States Presidential election, Animal Nationalism invites visitors to experience iconic symbols of American democracy and identity in wholly unexpected ways. At the Exhibition Hall, a powerful wind moving tons of air per minute will lure visitors to a colossal American flag flying “violently, incessantly, unnervingly and gorgeously,” all day and all night for seven days. Visitors may access the flag installation, which the artist has playfully titled Trinket, at any hour during its run. Trinket is intended to set the stage for lively conversations about democracy, citizenship, power, and our individual and collective agency in shaping the culture in which we live. "This project is a chance for people to feel the flag. People need to feel their democracy, not just hear words about it. For me, democracy is active, not passive. With Trinket, I am showing something that’s always been true. The American flag is not a toy. It’s not tame. It’s bright, loud, bristling and alive." — William Pope.L At Grand Arts, a video titled Small Cup will run continuously during regular gallery hours. The last screening each day, at 4:30 p.m., will feature a live musical performance. Small Cup was filmed in an abandoned textile mill in the town of Lewiston, Maine, where the artist lives. The film immerses viewers in a labyrinthine environment of echoing mill halls, barnyard sounds and characters and, at the mill’s center, a model of a Capitol-style dome or cupola. A signature architectural element of university, church, bank and government buildings, the Italian-designed cupola (literally, “small cup”) exists in the American imagination as an enduring symbol of ritual, law and tradition. In Small Cup, which is a cross between Animal Farm and Blair Witch Project, the Capitol is transformed and consumed right before our eyes. William Pope.L is a visual and performance-theater artist and educator who makes culture out of contraries. He has created multi-disciplinary works since the 1970s, and exhibited internationally, including New York, London, Los Angeles, Vienna, Montreal, Berlin, Zurich, and Tokyo. Select recent projects have been sited at Art Institute of Chicago, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Galerie Catherine Bastide and Sammlung Falckenberg. He is a featured artist in Intersections edited by Marci Nelligan and Nicole Mauro, and How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness by Darby English. Pope.L (b. 1955) is a prominent, multidisciplinary artist known for ironic and martial conceptual art dealing with consumerism, social class, and racism. He regularly draws upon his African-American heritage to tackle variations upon what he calls "social conundrum." Pope.L tackles "social conundra" with a humorous and visceral angle. The "social conundra" that he aims to highlight in his work includes issues revolving round race, homelessness, social class and oppression. He has been trenchantly dubbed The Friendliest Black Artist in America, which is also the title of a book on his works published in 2002 by MIT Press. Recent activity by Pope.L includes The Black Factory, a wayfaring project initiated in 2004 and displayed at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MOCA) as part of The Interventionists show. In another performance piece called The Great White Way, Pope.L crawled from the Battery north through Manhattan dressed in a Superman outfit. A text by Holland Cotter in the New York Times dated March 30, 2008, states that Pope.L continues to make performance works based on racial issues despite the wane in fashion for identity politics. Throughout Pope.L's career he has received continual support from foundations including four fellowships to Yaddo. However, in 2001, the acting chairman of the NEA, Robert Martin, rescinded support for eRacism, despite the fact that a panel had recommended the show receive a $20,000 grant. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts forwarded the offer of a grant instead. Pope.L currently works as a lecturer of Theater and Rhetoric at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. |
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William Pope.L, Polis or the Garden or Human Nature in Action, 2006, Photo credit: Thierry Bal/Thomas Dane Gallery, London. |
William Pope.L, #1060F 5.3.04, 5.17.04 Small Failure Writ Large, detail, No date, Mixed media and courtesy the artist, The Project, and Kenny Schachter ROVE. |
William Pope.L Says He's the Friendliest Black Artist in America |
William Pope.L, #301F NYU/Napkin, Rocket Crash, n.d.
William Pope.L, #987F Penis with Glasses and Friends, 2004.
William Pope.L, #299F As If Drawing Another Rocket Will Make a Difference, No date, Mixed media and courtesy the artist, The Project, and Kenny Schachter ROVE.
William Pope.L, #20F 7.23.04, 5.25.04, 8.4.04, 4.22.05, 9.13.06, 9.14.06 Sailboat White Mountain Postcard, detail, No date, Mixed media and courtesy the artist, The Project, and Kenny Schachter ROVE. |
Art Institute of Chicago William Pope.L is one of the most original visual and performance artists working today. The exhibition Featuring on-site installations created exclusively for the Art Institute, Pope.L’s Drawing, Dreaming, Drowning is the artist’s first solo show at a major encyclopedic art museum. As the self-proclaimed “friendliest black artist in America,” Pope.L is known for a conceptual, often performance-based art practice, that confronts issues of race, sex, power, consumerism, and social class. He is best known for the more than 40 “crawls” he has staged since 1978 as part of his eRacism project, in which he inches his way through busy city streets on his belly, back, hands, and knees drawing attention to the least-empowered members of society. He also challenges society's ideass of what a black artist is and the kind of work he or she makes. Encompassing four projects, Drawing, Dreaming, Drowning centers on 50 works from Pope.L’s ongoing series, Failure Drawings. This massive work-in-progress — 700 drawings to date — is created by Pope.L when he travels. Incorporating gum wrappers, newspaper fragments, hotel stationery, and foreign currency, the drawings are evidence of Pope.L’s mood shifts, thoughts of mortality and success, and inner conflicts and concerns. The common element of a horizon in the Failure Drawings — a metaphor for the boundary between life and death, and for locating himself in physical place — relates to the theme of transience in much of his work. The diaristic and the formal merge in the Failure Drawings, rich in interpretive possibilities and vast in scope. Exclusive to the Art Institute’s exhibition is Relational Painting aka If Black is Beautiful … (2007). A sprawling construction made up of 99 individual components, Relational Painting centers on an intensely collaged, drawn and painted black vinyl tarp, lights, electrical cords, a soundtrack, and the detritus (plastic bottles, cigarette butts) — accumulated during the artist’s fabrication of the work. Engaging with the idea that art does not function without a viewer, Pope.L also highlights the amount of visual and audible noise the audience must contend with in any sort of social space, be it gallery space or the urban street. Providing visitors with an environment rather than a surface, Pope.L challenges the traditional definition of painting as well as the intrinsic relationships between parts of an artwork. The final two projects are reconfigurations of previous works specifically for the Art Institute: Rebuilding the Monument (chicago version/the vitrine problem) (2007) presents three wall-mounted Plexiglas vitrines containing six 40-pound bags of lawn fertilizer, each bearing Xeroxed reproductions of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s likeness and heavily worked with paint and glue medium; in Void for the Undocumented from Venus, Nicaragua (2007), Pope.L beckons visitors with an eerie green light dispensed from a window cut just out of reach, in the wall above the door to a storage closet. Each piece in its own way destabilizes and challenges predominant social norms by calling into question what we take for granted — the reverence of public figures, the conferred value of the missing or inaccessible — and subjecting assumptions to rigorous interrogation. Born in 1955 in Newark, New Jersey, Pope.L has garnered the reputation of a provocateur over the course of his 30-year career. His work bears testament to the enduring, ongoing struggle of conformity and those that choose to go against the grain. “You can hold contraries, bound together, without blurring them together,” wrote Pope.L of his art. “The fact is I am black and I am influenced by historically European-based art. I am interested in formal issues and I am interested in social issues. Think of it as a bunch of flowers — daises, lilies, daffodils. I want you to hold them all in a bundle but see them each distinctly.” William Pope.L: Drawing, Dreaming, Drowning is co-curated by Lisa Dorin, assistant curator of contemporary art, the Art Institute of Chicago; and Darby English, associate professor of art history at the University of Chicago. |
CUSP Performance/Installation created by William Pope.L, in concert with Samsøn Gallery. March 5, 2010. (various performers). |
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