Pope.L, an uncompromising conceptual and performance artist who explores themes of race, class and what he calls “have-not-ness,” and who is known for crawling the length of Broadway in a Superman costume , died Saturday at his home in Chicago. He is 68.
The death was confirmed by his gallery, Mitchell-Innes and Nash. No reason was given.
By 2001, when he began “The Great White Way: 22 Miles, 9 Years, 1 Street, Broadway, New York,” as the show was eventually titled, Pope.L was known in the art world for a career spanning every medium from writing to photography, from painting to sculpture, and from performance to straight theatre.
His enduring themes are the interconnected hardships and differences he experienced as a Black American and a child of the working class. But the impact of his work derives less from the literal meaning of its surface contents, which can be difficult to decode, than from its sheer intensity, and from his willingness to say and do things that others would not . Especially when performing, he used his own physical presence to make the audience surprise themselves.
His first “crawls,” as he called them, took place in Times Square in 1978, when he moved on his stomach across 42nd Street in a pinstriped suit with a yellow square stitched on the back. Being horizontal in an unrelentingly vertical city is a simple gesture that pierces most of the collective delusions that run that city, simultaneously destroying and rejecting the pose of an upright citizen. It dramatizes, with a strong mixture of satire and resistance, the experience of subjugation particularly among Black Americans. And the inconsistency of a man in business attire lying on the sidewalk draws attention to the homeless and disenfranchised who are usually ignored by the average upstanding citizen.
In the same year, in SoHo, he perform “Thunderbird Immolation aka Meditation Square Piece” in front of the building where influential dealers Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend had galleries. Cross-legged in another square of yellow cloth, surrounded by a circle of loose matches, Pope.L evokes the Buddhist monks who famously set themselves on fire in Vietnam by pouring wine and Coca -Cola on his head, using a fortified wine heavily marketed in poor Black neighborhoods. Provocative, ambitious and more than a little funny, it is emblematic of his practice. (When someone came out of the building to complain, he politely took his things and left.)
“Today people often want art to have a clear and even redemptive political message, but Pope.L did not give us that,” Scott Rothkopf, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, said in an interview . “He had a brilliant capacity to make difficult, even terrifying facts about American society into strange and challenging work. It could be truculent, or funny, or both, but it wasn’t easy.”
In a 2019 video interview for the Museum of Modern Art, which acquired some of his early performance works before the “member,” his retrospective that year, Pope.L talked about creating another crawl in Tompkins Square Park in 1991. “I was writing a lot,” he said. “I mean, that’s all I did. I was quite scripted, and I had to find a more direct way of doing things culturally.”
What he encountered, wrote the critic C. Carr in an essay accompanying the 2002 book “William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America,” is another Black man, a local, who rushes over to ask if he’s okay; to upbrain the white cameraman hired to document the performance; and finally exclaims, while crying, “I wear a suit like that to work!”
For “The Great White Way,” which he began in 2001 and continued until 2009, Pope.L crawled the length of Broadway, from New York Harbor to the Bronx, in segments as short as a few blocks depending on what his elbows and knees can take. He’s wearing a Superman costume, minus the cape; gardening gloves; and a skateboard strapped to his back.
Among a wide range of other performances that curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, writing in the catalog for “member,” called “existential mirrors of absurd anxiety,” Pope.L ate of pieces of The Wall Street Journal while sitting on the toilet; covered himself with flour, mayonnaise, milk and other white substances; marshaled volunteers to pull an eight-ton truck by hand through Cleveland; and copyrighted another mordant jab as an epithet for himself: “the kindest Black artist in America.” He is also a longtime faculty member at Bates College in Maine and for the last dozen years has taught in the visual arts department of the University of Chicago.
The 2019 MoMA show, which featured documentation and materials connected to 13 early performances, was one of three concurrent shows. There was also one new installation at the Whitney and “occupation,” sponsored by the Public Art Fund, a lineup of 140 volunteers crawled from Greenwich Village to Union Square.
“From its earliest beginnings,” said Pope.L Interview magazine in 2013, “the crawl project was conceived as a group performance. Unfortunately for me, at that time, I was the only volunteer.”
Earlier this year, Pope.L built an impenetrable white room in the middle of the 52 Walker gallery in Manhattan, as part of “Impossible Failures,” a show that also includes the work of artist Gordon Matta-Clark. A current show, “Hospital,” at the South London Gallery in London through Feb. 11, centered on a group of crumbling white towers. A toilet atop the central tower overlooks what Pope.L did to eat pieces of The Wall Street Journal.
“Within two hours at an opening,” says his gallerist Lucy Mitchell-Innes, “he thinks about what he wants to do, and then it’s kind of transmogrified into this incredible new piece. It did what it always does, which makes it relevant for today. It became a metaphor for the collapse of social structures: the collapse of the economy, the collapse of international politics, the collapse of the rich world and the poor world. You think of all those things when you look at it.”
Pope.L was born William Pope on June 28, 1955, in Newark to Lucille Lancaster and William Pope. She spent part of what she remembers as an unstable childhood in nearby Keyport, and part of it in the East Village with her grandmother Desmonda Lancaster, an artist who exhibited quilt pieces at the Studio Museum in Harlem in the 1960s.
He is survived by his partner, Mami Takahashi; a younger brother, Eugene Pope; and a son, Desmond Tarkowski-Pope.L.
According to Ms. Mitchell-Innes, “Pope.L,” a portmanteau of the artist’s original surname and that of his mother, was created by his students at Bates College in the mid-1980s. He adopted it and took “William Pope.L” for nearly three decades before dropping “William.”
Pope.L studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and earned a bachelor’s degree at Montclair State College (now Montclair State University) in New Jersey in 1978. He also studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and the Mabou Mines theater in St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan, described by playwright Lee Breuer as teaching “a no man’s land between experimental theater and performance art.”
Jessica Stockholder, an associate professor at the University of Chicago, described Pope.L as a deeply committed and effective teacher.
“He’s very open to all different kinds of people,” she said by phone, “and is very sympathetic and concerned about people’s well-being.”
Ebony Haynes, who curated “Impossible Failures,” agreed.
“He had this way of listening to everything,” she said. “He gave you the floor – without knowing you, he knew that at the very least you, and everyone, deserved to be heard.”
