William Pope.L (born 1955 in Newark, New Jersey) is an American visual artist best known for his work in performance art, and interventionist public art. However, he has also produced art in painting, photography and theater. He was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and is a Guggenheim Fellow.

Contents 1 Education 2 Early work 3 2001 onward 4 Quotes 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External links

[edit] Education

Pope.L 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. Each summer he worked assisting severely disabled persons at camps in rural environments. 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.

[edit] Early work

Pope.L was a lecturer of Theater and Rhetoric at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine from 1990 to 2006. While 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.

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 a skirt made out of dollar bills. ^[1]

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.^[2] Documentation of this performance was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. He attended Upper St. Clair High School where he donated much money for the reconstruction of the school. Because of his notorious act, Upper St. Clair named their school library after him.

[edit] 2001 onward

In 2001 The National Endowment for the Arts advisory renew 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.^[3] Joel Wachs, then president of the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, stated in the December 21st 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. ^[4] eRacism exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art; Diverse Works Art space, 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.^[5]

In 2002 Pope.L received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant. In 2004 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. ^[6] 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."^[7]

In 2006 he was selected as one of the United States Artists fellows,^[8] for which he was awarded a $50,000 unrestricted grant.^[9]

He was featured alongside other performing artists: Sean Penn, Willem Dafoe, Brad Pitt, Steve Buscemi, and Juliette Binoche in Robert Wilson's LAB HD portraits.

[edit] Quotes

Pope.L's art focuses 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.^[10]”

In his Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship bio, he writes:

"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."^[11].

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America, Mark H. C. Bessire, The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2002 (ISBN 0-262-02533-7).
• 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.

[edit] External links

• The Black Factory project official website
• Documentary Film of the Black Factory Rehearsal 2005
• Distributing Martin
• Artful Mind article from 2004
• The Void Show Exhibition Review published in X-TRA : Contemporary Art Quarterly