Background
William Pope.L was born on June 28, 1955, in Newark, New Jersey, United States.
William Pope.L was born on June 28, 1955, in Newark, New Jersey, United States.
During the period from 1973 till 1975, William studied at Pratt Institute. Between 1977 and 1978, he took part in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.
In 1978, Pope.L got a Bachelor of Arts degree from Montclair State University. Later, in 1981, the artist received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Visual Arts from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.
In 1990, William began his career as a lecturer of Theater and Rhetoric, working at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, a post he continued to hold till 2010. Being a faculty member, he also headed a production of Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin In the Sun".
In 1997, while performing his "ATM Piece", William 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. For the 1991's performance "Tompkins Square Crawl", which is a part of "eRacism" project (the project includes endurance-based performances, consisting of "crawls"), which Pope.L started in the late 1970's, the artist put on a business suit and crawled through the gutter in Tompkins Square Park in New York City, pushing a potted flower with one hand at the same time. One of the longest performances from this project is his "The Great White Way". For this project, Pope.L dressed in a Superman outfit, fastened a skateboard to his back and crawled the entire 22 miles of Broadway in New York City. The performance took five years to finish.
In 2002 and 2017, William was included in the Whitney Biennial. In 2003, the artist's "eRacism" was exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, Diverse Works Art Space in Houston, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) in Oregon, as well as Artists Space in New York City. In 2008, William's work, titled "One Substance, Eight Supports, One Situation", was chosen to participate in The Renaissance Society's group exhibition "Black Is, Black Ain't".
In 2015, William had the largest solo museum exhibition of his work to date at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where one of his main works, entitled "Trinket", was presented. The same year, the artist produced "The Beautiful", a new choreographed crawl performance. It was staged at Art Basel in Miami Beach for the first time.
Currently, William works as an Associate Professor at the University of Chicago, a post he has been holding since 2010. In addition, in 2004, he served as a visiting artist at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
William Pope.L is a well-known visual artist, best known for enacting arduous and provocative interventions in public spaces. He addresses issues and themes, ranging from language to gender, race, social struggle and community. His boundary-breaking practice ranges from performance to painting, installation, video, sculpture and theater. One of his most famous performances is "The Great White Way". Pope.L's most renowned installation works include "Trinket".
Pope.L is the recipient of numerous awards, grants and fellowships, including the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Joyce Foundation Award and many others.
William's art bases itself on issues of consumption, social class and masculinity as they relate to race. Referring to himself as "a fisherman of social absurdity", Pope.L has developed a body of work, that poses provocative questions about a culture, consumed with success, yet riven by social, racial and economic conflict. Resisting easy categorization, his career encompasses theatrical performances, street actions, language, painting, video, drawing, installation and sculpture. Pope.L’s work explores the fraught connection between prosperity and what he calls "have-not-ness".
Quotations:
"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."
"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."
Pope.L calls himself "The Friendliest Black Artist in America" and "a fisherman of social absurdity".
