The Life and Practice of William Pope.L
Born in Newark, United States, William Pope.L was a multifaceted visual artist whose practice spanned painting, photography, performance, video, and theater. He was educated at the Pratt Institute and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, later earning a Bachelor of Arts from Montclair State University and a Master of Fine Arts from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Throughout his career, he served as a lecturer of Theater and Rhetoric at Bates College and later held a faculty position at the University of Chicago. His diverse body of work has been featured in the Whitney Biennial and at the Museum of Modern Art.
Performance and Symbolic Inquiry
Pope.L is widely recognized for his endurance-based performances, specifically his series of eRacism "crawls." These works included the Tompkins Square Crawl, where he crawled through a gutter in a business suit, and the Great White Way, a twenty-two-mile crawl along Broadway. His performance ATM Piece involved him being attached to a bank door by an eight-foot length of Italian sausage while wearing a skirt made of U.S. dollar bills. In his work Trinket, a monumental U.S. flag was subjected to constant wind from industrial fans, and in The Beautiful, performers dressed as Superman performed a choreographed crawl. His art often utilized everyday objects, reimagined as symbols to reflect on societal norms, consumption, and social class.
