This work – ‘Skin Set Drawing. Green People are Hope without Reason'(2004) – is in the collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem.
About:
Blue People Are A Drop of Halter, 2012
The Great White Way, 2002 (ongoing performance).
Beginning in the late ’90s, William Pope.L famously crawled along 22 miles of sidewalk, from the beginning to the end of Broadway—Manhattan’s longest street—wearing a capeless Superman outfit with a skateboard strapped to his back. In varying fits and starts, the performance, titled The Great White Way, 22 Miles, 9 Years, 1 Street, took nine years to complete, with each installment lasting as long as Pope.L could endure the knee and elbow pain (often about six blocks). It is among 30-plus “crawl” pieces that he has performed over more than three decades of work as an artist.
Installation View, 2012.
Pictures of the denigrated superhero dragging himself through the business district are among the clearest and most iconic images in Pope.L’s oeuvre, but for him, the documentation isn’t as essential as the actual experience of exhaustion and self-imposed labor that comes along with performing the work. For this reason, the 57-year-old Pope.L often invites participants to collaborate with him, organizing large group crawls and interactive installations. This June, with the help of local citizens working alternately in teams, he plans to pull, by hand, an eight-ton truck 45 miles through the streets of Cleveland for 72 consecutive hours. It’s a follow-up to his 2011 post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans piece, Blink, in which volunteers pulled a truck, lit up with projected photographs of the city, from 6 p.m. until 6 a.m. Such performances live in the space between the work of a community organizer and that of a shaman, mobilizing people and attempting to address societal concerns through an abstraction of grand themes such as labor and identity politics.
The Black Factory, 2005.
Other classic Pope.L performances have included 2000’s Eating the Wall Street Journal, which he did on a toilet, to allow the paper to pass through him, transformed; and his copyrighting of his personal slogan: “The Friendliest Black Artist in America©.” He also makes photographs, sculptures, writings, and paintings, often using a variety of white-food-based materials: mayonnaise, flour, milk. His book Black People Are Cropped: Skin Set Drawings 1997-2011 was recently published by JPR Ringier and chronicles his ongoing drawing series—a project with a poetic, absurd perspective on human skin color. The book contains his bright scrawlings of pseudo-stereotypes—such as Red People Are Boner Cosmic and Green People Are Shitty—and a philosophical essay-poem on sociology.
Color Isn’t Matter, 2010.
Beginning in the late ’90s, William Pope.L famously crawled along 22 miles of sidewalk, from the beginning to the end of Broadway—Manhattan’s longest street—wearing a capeless Superman outfit with a skateboard strapped to his back. In varying fits and starts, the performance, titled The Great White Way, 22 Miles, 9 Years, 1 Street, took nine years to complete, with each installment lasting as long as Pope.L could endure the knee and elbow pain (often about six blocks). It is among 30-plus “crawl” pieces that he has performed over more than three decades of work as an artist.
Pictures of the denigrated superhero dragging himself through the business district are among the clearest and most iconic images in Pope.L’s oeuvre, but for him, the documentation isn’t as essential as the actual experience of exhaustion and self-imposed labor that comes along with performing the work. For this reason, the 57-year-old Pope.L often invites participants to collaborate with him, organizing large group crawls and interactive installations. This June, with the help of local citizens working alternately in teams, he plans to pull, by hand, an eight-ton truck 45 miles through the streets of Cleveland for 72 consecutive hours. It’s a follow-up to his 2011 post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans piece, Blink, in which volunteers pulled a truck, lit up with projected photographs of the city, from 6 p.m. until 6 a.m. Such performances live in the space between the work of a community organizer and that of a shaman, mobilizing people and attempting to address societal concerns through an abstraction of grand themes such as labor and identity politics.
Other classic Pope.L performances have included 2000’s Eating the Wall Street Journal, which he did on a toilet, to allow the paper to pass through him, transformed; and his copyrighting of his personal slogan: “The Friendliest Black Artist in America©.” He also makes photographs, sculptures, writings, and paintings, often using a variety of white-food-based materials: mayonnaise, flour, milk. His book Black People Are Cropped: Skin Set Drawings 1997-2011 was recently published by JPR Ringier and chronicles his ongoing drawing series—a project with a poetic, absurd perspective on human skin color. The book contains his bright scrawlings of pseudo-stereotypes—such as Red People Are Boner Cosmic and Green People Are Shitty—and a philosophical essay-poem on sociology.
(Quote from introduction on interview with Pope by Ross Simonini in Interview Magazine)