In a 2001 interview, curator Lowery Stokes Sims asked Pope.L when he decided to make performance his primary form of expression. He never did, he answered. “Other folks made this assumption about my practice because the performances were what they were most aware of,” he said.
Pope.L is still best known for his crawls. Starting in the late 1970s, the artist performed more than 30 of them, traversing cities on his hands and knees, most famously in Manhattan, wearing a dark wool suit or dressed as Superman. He embarked on his first crawl while still in art school, reasoning that performance was the easiest way for him to reach people
But in all that time—and up until his death in 2023—he was also working in his studio. Pope.L produced work that ranged across drawing, painting, writing, video, and installation, all in an effort to help audiences see the world a little differently. “I believe art re-ritualizes the everyday to reveal something fresh about our lives,” he once said. Part of his wide-ranging output, including pieces that have never been exhibited before, will soon be presented at Independent by Mitchell-Innes & Nash.
Pope.L, Title Unknown, 2023, vinyl on aluminum, photography by Kunning Huang. © The Estate of Pope.L, courtesy of The Estate and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.
Pope.L, Harriet Tubman Spins the Universe, 1998-2017, acrylic, peanut butter, ballpoint, marker, ink, pencil, post-it, twine, eye screw, S-hook, glue and mending plates on sheetrock on ledger with tape and shim, 52 3/8 x 50 3/8 x 6 3/4 in. © The Estate of Pope.L, courtesy of The Estate and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.
Pope.L, Title Unknown, 1994-5, acrylic, ink and collage on washcloth, 11 x 11 in, photography by Kunning Huang. © The Estate of Pope.L, courtesy of The Estate and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.
Pope.L, Title Unknown, circa 1998, ballpoint pen, marker, ink, hair and tape on collaged paper, 10 1/2 by 11 in, photography by Kunning Huang. ©The Estate of Pope.L, courtesy of The Estate and Mitchell-Innes & Nash
Pope.L’s multidisciplinary practice constantly questioned and challenged accepted wisdom, especially on the politics of race, gender, and class. One vehicle for recontextualizing such categories was his interrogation of high-profile figures.
He cut out the forehead and bridge of the nose from a four-foot-tall metal mask that depicts a caricature of former President Barack Obama, whiting out the eyes. In earlier works, he manipulated and multiplied the features of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He had performers wear latex masks of the politician’s likeness, encouraging viewers to re-evaluate her public persona. Video works show a pair of Condoleezzas discussing the iconic Black sitcom Good Times or engaging in a kink ritual, providing a jarring foil to her conservative image.
Pope.L positioned figures like Harriet Tubman and Maya Angelou—and, by extension, their personas—against wacky phrases or chaotic imagery, not to dehumanize them, but rather to examine the complexities, or what he called “contraries,” of their lives.
Pope.L, Title Unknown, circa 2000, acrylic, graphite and footprints on plywood, 48 x 25 3/8 in. © The Estate of Pope.L, courtesy of The Estate and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.
So complex is the scene in Harriet Tubman Spins the Universe (1998-2017) that the protagonist is barely visible, engulfed by a web of paint mixed with commonplace materials like peanut butter and glue. Perhaps it is a metaphor for how stories can be told and retold until they no longer carry much meaning at all. The work forms part of the long-ranging Proto-Skin Set series, in which Pope.L layered found materials like mass-media advertisements into assemblages that probed at the possibilities of language.
In the artist’s hands, these personalities aren’t who we think they are; the worlds they live in aren’t what we think they are. There are seemingly no deep insights to be gained into the inner lives of these figures. Rather, the works carry a recognition that their identities will always be part fact and part fiction: a social construct, just like the concepts of race, gender, and class.
Other strategies deployed by Pope.L border on explicit: take the whitish painting with the words “Martin Luther King’s Dick as Seen From Pluto” written along one side. A nod to King’s history of womanizing, perhaps. Or a reference to his masturbatory practice of self-promotion. Or both. With characteristic humor, the artist asks whether the blind deference so often accorded to King, the civil rights hero, obscures the complicated man he was. Insisting on King’s body “digs him up from the catacombs of celebration and presence and places him in the lived moment of contraries where we all have to deal,” Pope.L told Lowery Stokes Sims. Scribbling quotes on pairs of soiled male underwear was also not outside his artistic playbook.
Pope.L, Real Kitsch #12, 1990, mixed media on underwear, 10 1/8 x 14 3/4 in, photography Kunning Huang. © The Estate of Pope.L, courtesy of The Estate and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.
Well beyond his bodily feats of endurance as a performer, Pope.L repeatedly referenced the body, decay, and abjection in his studio practice. A bag of manure bears the smiling image of MLK in Rebuilding the Monument (2007). Questioned by the artist Martha Wilson about his use of “toxic and smelly stuff” and the possible association between manure and Blackness, Pope.L responded elliptically. “In this country, there’s a history of black people being constructed as valueless or threatening or nothing. If you hold up a mirror to certain white liberals, and you say, ‘Hey you know, you’re right! You’ve got a point. Black people are pieces of shit,’ they’d get nervous.”
The very tendency to make declarations about groups of people based on their skin color is confronted in the Skin Set series. These text-based drawings or paintings are raw and in-your-face, but also opaque enough to have the impact of the words, often referencing Blackness or whiteness, linger. Their nonsensical phrases exemplify the absurdity that coursed through Pope.L’s practice as a whole: “BLACK PEOPLE ARE THE HATRED OF THE CICADAS,” “WHITE PEOPLE ARE NICE TO THEIR IDEOLOGY,” and “BROWN PEOPLE ARE A LIQUID.”
Pope.L, Brown People Are A Liquid, 2011-2012, mixed media on paper, 59 3/16 x 59 5/8 in. © The Estate of Pope.L, courtesy of The Estate and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.
If not always directly addressing socio-political issues, Pope.L continually called out people’s anxieties around them. In many cases, his artistic starting point was to draw attention to the privileges and prejudices that shape America. By crawling in the street around Tompkins Square Park—previously the site of riots involving the homeless who took shelter there—he sacrificed “verticality” for vulnerability, drawing attention to the marginalization of certain bodies in public spaces.
He titled that 1991 performance How Much Is that Nigger in the Window a.k.a. Tompkins Square Crawl to “make these words approachable but not lose the sting of their character,” as he put it. A video montage incorporating footage from Tompkins Square and other street performances, White Baby a.k.a. How Much Is That Nigger In The Window? (1992), will be presented at Independent, part of the same series of works originating in the artist’s residency at Franklin Furnace.
Here, as in so many other instances, Pope.L revisited core themes and strategies over a period of years: duration was a throughline of the artist’s production. The works in his Failure Drawings series, begun in 2003, eventually numbered over 1,100. Pope.L drew on scrap materials he found while traveling, such as a receipt or a Dunkin’ Donuts bag. He kept going back to some of the pieces to add new elements, ultimately mimicking his mode of working: always testing and adjusting his ideas, like a writer perfecting an unruly text. “The process of coming to terms with no final resolution is a lack worth having,” he once said.
Melissa Smith is an arts writer based in New York. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and a bachelor’s in fine arts from New York University. Her work has been published by the New York Times, Artnet News, The Art Newspaper, CULTURED, and other outlets.
