. . . Take the Cat to Work" according to (William) Pope. L, who died too obscurely almost three years ago at the age of 68, after a lifetime of WTF art.
Born and raised in the New York metropolitan area, Pope. L called himself "the friendliest Black artist in America." He once said "I am suspicious of things that make sense. " Look no further than his "Skin Sets" for proof. They're works. often executed with unconventional materials, that categorize people, a little absurdly, by their color if not their skin tone.
In this one, he scrawled "White People Are Sad" in ketchup over and over again.
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| White Drawing (1977) |
"Certainly an Act" at the Drawing Center exhibits dozens of Pope L.'s works on paper, but he's probably best known for his performance art which included a series of "crawls" he called "eRacism." One, "The Great White Way," took him five years to complete: wearing a Superman costume with a skateboard strapped to his back, he traversed all 22 miles of Broadway. Oil painting must have seemed like a walk in the park, although he took his time with that, too.
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| "Portrait a.k.a. The American Dream Is to Be Able to Think" (1989-90) |
Can you find the woman who would be gracing the front of the $20 bill if it weren't for the current Secretary of the Treasury? She's whirling like a dervish, just as you might expect for someone who helped more than 70 members of her friends and family escape slavery using the Underground Railroad.
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| "Harriet Tubman Spins the Universe" (1998-2017) |
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| "Kemosabe" (1994) |
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| (2003-2022) |
The act of making art was a lot more meaningful to Pope. L than the end result. Like the cliche says, he seems to have enjoyed the journey a lot more than the destination. Though his so-called "Failure Drawings" are quite small and anything but, he worked them over on multiple occasions, embedding the dates of each revision or addition.
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| "Near the ?" (#1062,2004) |
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| "Rocket Fumble, Yellow, Blue, Green Sky" (#110, 2004-06) |
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| "The Point Is . . . " (#1250, 2004) |
"Problem" (#541, 2008-09)
Pope. L made an indelible impression at the 2017 Biennial with"Claim," certainly the only time I'd ever seen bologna (the cold cut, not the city) on display in a museum, although by the time I got there the aroma had faded. In "Pop Tart Frieze" (1998) he does something similar, using actual, strawberry-flavored breakfast food as a canvas for his commentary on the kind of food scarcity and nutrition he experienced as a child living in a disadvantaged neighborhood.
Points of view have rarely been as odd or uncommercial as Pope. L's. 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.
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| "The Unknown" (not dated) |
But his students at Bates College, where he taught for two decades, gave the artist his affectionate moniker (L is the first letter of his mother's maiden name; his grandmother grew cotton on a vacant lot in Bed Stuy because she thought northerners should know what it looked like). When the National Endowment for the Arts rescinded a $42,000 grant that would have brought "eRacism" to a wider audience through a traveling exhibition in 2001, the Andy Warhol Foundation picked up the cost. And Robert Wilson shot a video portrait of him.
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| William Pope. L by Robert Wilson (2005) |
I guess if you knew, you knew. I only wish I had.
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