Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, June 25, 2025 : William Pope.L, an American visual artist, performance, and interventionist public artist (#2314)

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

Artist of the Day, June 25, 2025 : William Pope.L, an American visual artist, performance, and interventionist public artist (#2314)

William Pope.L, (1955-2023) also known as Pope.L, was an accomplished American visual artist recognized for his contributions to performance art and interventionist public art. He also created pieces in painting, photography, and theater. He was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and was the recipient of the Creative Capital Visual Arts Award, as well as a Guggenheim Fellow. Notably, Pope.L was also highlighted in the 2017 Whitney Biennial for his work.

Pope.L was born William Pope in Newark, New Jersey, the second child of William Pope and Lucille Lancaster, and was raised in Keyport, New Jersey and East Village, Manhattan. He attended Pratt Institute from 1973 to 1975 and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program from 1977 to 1978. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Montclair State University, Montclair, New Jersey, in 1978. 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.

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.

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. Documentation of this performance was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

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. 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. 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.[

In 2002 Pope.L received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award. In 2004 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. 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."

The Mitchell-Inness and Nash Gallery in Chelsea showcased William Pope.L's solo exhibition, Landscape + Object + Animal, featuring works spanning from the 1990s to present. Through his diverse range of practices, including painting, collage, performance, video, and text excerpts, Pope.L offers a critical reflection on the societal norms that govern our lives. This review highlights the allegorical nature of his work, where everyday objects, stripped of their original meanings, are reimagined as politically charged symbols. By embodying multiple personas, from man to animal to Superman, Pope.L challenges the boundaries and labels that divide our world and reconstructs the landscape we occupy.

In 2015 MOCA, Los Angeles presented Trinket, 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.

In 2015 Pope.L produced The Beautiful, a new choreographed crawl performance staged for the first time at Art Basel in Miami Beach. 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.

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. 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.

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