Five Ways to Say the Same Sadness: New Work William Pope.L

William Pope.L is internationally recognized for performances and installations that consistently challenge audiences to reexamine deeply entrenched and uniquely American ideas about class, racial stereotypes, and our relationship with the rest of the world.  Pope.L is no stranger to controversy. Drawing on art historical traditions of radical performance art and public interventions, his work calls attention to the paradoxes of race and confounds preconceptions of what “black art” should be.  His installations raise questions about art as a commodity and urge closer examination of everyday experiences; in a single proposed sculpture Pope.L targets contemporary culture’s quest for instant gratification with references to Popsicles, O.J. Simpson, High Art, and African-American stereotypes.

Underlying his trenchant social critique is a fierce sense of humor, an unabashed playfulness, and a deep human consciousness that in his own words stems as much from Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges as it does from American comedian, Richard Pryor.  “Like them,” he says, ”when confronted with the irresolvable, I revert to play.  I want to ignore the oncoming locomotive, and I also want to mount it and ride all the way into the tunnel and out the other side.”    

In September 2003, Pope. L presented a lecture at the University at Albany Art Museum entitled My Art Practice and Welcome To It: Tradition, Family, and Peanut Butter which centered on his personal responses to the social inequality that he sees as a persistent feature of contemporary art practice.  

Pope.L is a recipient of numerous grants and residencies including a Guggenheim Fellowship Award (2004) and three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. He has had  recent solo exhibitions and performances at Artists Space (New York) and The Project (New York and Los Angeles). His work is on view this summer at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and has been featured in exhibitions at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, The Drawing Center (New York), and at the 2002 Whitney Biennial. His first museum-scale retrospective, eRacism is traveling to venues throughout the United States and Europe and is accompanied by a comprehensive monograph, William Pope L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America, published by MIT Press.  Pope.L teaches in the Department of Theater and Rhetoric at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.