THE FRIENDLIEST BLACK ARTIST IN AMERICA
Born William Pope in Newark, New Jersey, he was the second child of William senior and Lucille Lancaster.
His father left their home when William was very small. Lucille moved the family around. He grew up in Keyport, New Jersey, followed by East Village, Manhattan.
It was a tough upbringing. Lucille was a drug addict and alcoholic. “We never knew from one moment to the next, when we would move, what we were going to eat. You grow up scared. You realise there’s not much difference between you and street people.”
William’s grandmother was a cleaner and she often took the boy to work with her. Once, she introduced him to a client as ‘a portrait painter’. This gave William the idea that this was something he could do – and his interest in art was born.
Upon leaving school, he went to a private university, the Pratt Institute. Fees were high and William couldn’t afford them, so he dropped out before graduation.
From there, he had a series of jobs working in factories, before joining the study programme at the Whitney Museum of American Art. “My life was very uncertain. I’ll never get rid of that uncertainty.”
Ultimately, William went to Montclair State University in New Jersey, where he finally got his BA.
It was at this point that he changed his name, to ‘Pope. L’. The L was as a tribute to his mother. He classed himself as a conceptual and performance artist.
His breakthrough exhibition was entitled ‘I Get Paid to Rub Mayo on My Body’. That is exactly what he did. He stood in the front window of New York’s Franklin Furnace art space, slathered with mayonnaise.
In the late 1970s, Pope. L began ‘eRacism’, a set of performance pieces.
They were a series of forty endurance crawls. They were of different lengths and duration.
For the Tompkins Square Crawl, Pope. L was dressed in a business suit. He crawled through the square holding a potted plant in one hand.
The ‘Great White Way’(subtitled ‘22 Miles, 9 Years, 1 Street’), another of his crawls, was a lengthy effort covering the whole of Broadway. Pope. L started at the Statue of Liberty and ended at his mother’s home in the Bronx. He had to crawl on and off the ferry to cross the Hudson River.
He was dressed as Superman and had a skateboard strapped to his back. The journey took ‘only’ five years to complete.
Pope. L’s next exhibition was ‘Thunderbird Immolation’. He sat in a lotus position on a sidewalk in Manhattan, surrounded by matchsticks. The aim was to express the difficulty of achieving freedom.
In 1990, Pope. L was appointed lecturer in Theatre and Rhetoric at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. It was a job that he went on to hold for twenty years.
He directed a play by Lorraine Hansberry called ‘A Raisin in the Sun’. Although it was about the struggles of a black family, half of them were played by Caucasians. It caused quite a controversy.
In 1997, Pope. L performed his ‘ATM Piece’. He was attached to an 8-foot-long Italian sausage which was chained to the Chase Bank in Manhattan. He wore only Timberland boots and a skirt made out of dollar bills. He doled out money to passers-by.
In 2001, Pope. L was granted $42,000 by the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA). It was for a travelling retrospective called ‘William Pope. L: eRacism’ – a follow on from his earlier project.
Almost immediately, the acting chairman of the NEA, Robert S. Martin, withdrew the grant. There was a massive outcry in the American art world. The Andy Warhol Foundation said, “We don’t want the NEA’s decision to be something that has the effect of stopping an important exhibition of art.”
Instead, the Warhol Foundation funded Pope. L, to the tune of $50,000. The exhibition took place in Maine, Oregon and New York.
By now, Pope. L was in a relationship with fellow artist, Mami Takahashi. They had one son, named Desmond Tarkowski Pope. L.
Pope. L’s next exhibition was called ‘The Friendliest Black Artist in America’.
After that, he had the same phrase put on his business card.
Soon afterwards, he was awarded a large grant by the Guggenheim Museum.
The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) organised an art installation called ‘The Interventionists’. Pope. L was invited to be part of it.
His contribution was ‘The Black Factory’.
A factory arrived in a town and sets up an interactive workshop on the streets. People are invited to bring along objects that represent what it means to them to be black.
The Factory then performed plays that were based on these objects, which were photographed to create a visual library. Afterwards, some of the offerings were pulverized to make products that could be sold in the gift shop.
It also led to his project, ‘distributingMartin’. It could be accessed by a hidden portal on the Black Factory website. Once a person had entered, they could distribute parts of the imaginary body of Martin Luther King around the USA.
In 2006, Pope. L was awarded another large grant, this time from the US Artists – he was also made a Fellow.
This led to his 2008 artwork, ‘One Substance, Eight Supports, One Situation’. It was chosen as part of the Renaissance Society’s group exhibition ‘Black Is, Black Aint’.
In 2009, Pope. L held simultaneous exhibitions. The first piece was ‘Conquest’, a 140-person crawl, from Greenwich Village to Union Square in Manhattan. It was done in relay, with each person crawling for one and a half miles (which took them approximately five hours each).
The second exhibition was ‘Choir’, shown at MOCA. It consisted of a room with a large industrial water tank, full to the top. It was filled by an 8-foot upside down fountain. He attached microphones to the pipes and sounds resonated through the space.
In 2010, Pope. L became a lecturer at the University of Chicago.
To celebrate this, he created the ‘Whispering Campaign’. Throughout the German city of Kassel, he hid loudspeakers – and hushed voices were constantly heard throughout the city.
Another renowned performance piece was ‘Pull’. Pope. L persuaded volunteers from the city of Cleveland to pull an ice-cream van, 40km across the city. Whilst doing this, images that residents of the city had sent to him, were shown on a screen on the back of the truck. These represented what work meant to them. The purpose of this was to show people finding their way forward in times of economic hardship.
It also proved how willing the public were to get involved in his projects – and how popular Pope. L had become. “You don’t have to do it all by yourself.” He said he was a ‘provocateur – not an activist’. He told people to expect the unexpected.
In 2015, Pope. L held his biggest exhibition, at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in Los Angeles. The centre piece was a large American flag (54 feet by 16 feet). It was blown by large scale industrial fans and was illuminated from below by home-made theatrical lights.
During the exhibition, the flag frayed. Pope. L said it was a metaphor for the gradual destruction of democracy and voter participation in the USA. The display was entitled ‘Trinket’.
It was very difficult to find a turbine strong enough to keep the flag flying whilst causing it to fray. Pope. L had to resort to the aeroplane manufacturing industry for help.
Rapper, Kendrick Lamar, later used a version of ‘Trinket’ as an on-stage backdrop.
In the same year, Pope. L performed ‘The Beautiful’ in Miami Beach. Four men, all dressed as Superman (and with skateboards attached to their backs), roll towards a small stage in the dark. The audience could hear the rumbling of wheels through loudspeakers, with an electric guitar playing in the background.
The men then crab-walked up onto the stage, where they held each other close whilst singing ‘America the Beautiful’.
On one of his crawls, a black man tried to kick him in the face. The man was wearing a suit, just like Pope. L. He shouted at the artist, “You make me look like a jerk.”
On another occasion, a police officer tried to arrest Pope. L, claiming he was an ‘EDP’ (Emotionally Disturbed Person). The photo of the confrontation was subsequently used by Pope. L in his exhibitions, as proof of persecution.
Ultimately, the crawling did Pope. L little good. He fused his vertebrae – and had to stop.
In 2019, Pope. L caused great controversy by trying to name an exhibition ‘How Much is that N***** in the Window?’ The Museum of Modern Art expressed ‘grave concern’ at the title and threatened to withdraw its sponsorship of him. He reluctantly changed the name to ‘Member’.
He always fought racism and claimed he examined, and opposed, concepts of blackness and whiteness. Pope. L added, “I realised that for a lot of white people, mostly white people, their experience of race is personal. I’ve never thought of my experience as just mine.”
He said that he confronted racism with a mixture of humour and the absurd. His other great causes were challenging rampant consumerism and environmental injustice. Pope. L also wanted to examine black masculinity in public spaces.
Pope. L once did a performance where he ate a copy of the Wall Street Journal, smothered in milk and ketchup. The paper was seen by him as representative of the capitalist and commercial world.
The Black Factory put on an exhibition called ‘Am I a Black Man for Myself?’ It used items he considered stereotyped black people, such as bandanas and condoms.
He had an exhibition called ‘Flint Water’, after the scandal of 2014. Flint is a large city in Michigan with a predominantly black population. The state authorities decided to change the city’s water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River.
Unfortunately, the water from the river was untreated and contained lots of lead and bacteria. Additionally, the pipes used to carry this new supply of water were corroded. Lots of residents fell ill, culminating in an outbreak of Legionnaire’s Disease. Nevertheless, it took two years for the authorities to revert to using Lake Huron.
Pope. L’s exhibition featured bottles of water labelled ‘Flint Water’, which he sold afterwards.
Pope. L owned three art galleries, which were full of sculptures, installations, concept art and of course, regular performances. They were described by an art critic as, “Provocative, sad, funny and shocking.”
In November 2023, Pope. L had his very first exhibition in London.
Asked to describe his work, Pope. L said, “I am a fisherman of social absurdity, if you will. My purpose is to politicise disenfranchisement, to make it neutral, to reinvent what’s beneath us, to remind us where we all came from.”
He added, “Like the African shaman who chews his pepper seeds and spits seven times into the air, I believe art re-ritualises the everyday, to reveal something fresh about our lives. This revelation is vitality and it is a power to change the world.”
Wherever he performed (or exhibited), he attracted very large audiences. Pope. L was once described as, ‘The Poet Laureate of male performance artists.”
When he died, the New York Times called Pope. L, “Inarguably, the greatest performance artist of our time.”
RIP – Racism Installation (&) Performance
