Pope.L
American • b. 1955
Biography
Pope.L, who calls himself “The Friendliest Black Artist in America©”, is a visual artist and educator whose multidisciplinary practice uses binaries, contraries and preconceived notions embedded within contemporary culture. “At 62, POPE.L is inarguably the greatest performance artist of our time,” Megan O’Grady wrote in The New York Times Style Magazine in March 2018, “This is exactly the kind of label he would find absurd, but over the course of the last four decades, no artist has so consistently broken down the accepted boundaries of the genre in order to bring it closer to the public, with lacerating, perspicacious and gloriously anti-authoritarian projects that play with our received notions of race and class and almost always cut more than one way.”
Building upon his provocative performances and public interventions, Pope.L has applied the same social and formal strategies to painting, photography, performance, video, and installation to probe issues of language, system, class, race and gender. For his RePhotocollage series, Pope.L has manipulated and combined images of body parts to create “figural encounters”. Originating out of the artist’s desire to betray the artist’s hand while simultaneously creating images highly suggestive of the body, these compositions are scanned, flattened and reprinted on single large planes of paper.
Insights
Selected honors: Whitney Museum Bucksbaum Award (2017); Joyce Foundation Award (2012); Tiffany Foundation Award (2007); United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship (2006); Guggenheim Fellowship (2004)
“Like the African shaman who chews his pepper seeds and spits seven times into the air, I believe art re-ritualizes the everyday to reveal something fresh about our lives. This revelation is a vitality and it is a power to change the world."
Recent Pope.L headlines, Powered by Articker
27 July 2023 | LACMA On Fire
MOCA Buys Pope.L's 'Trinket'26 July 2023 | ARTnews
Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles Acquires William Pope.L’s ‘Trinket’6 June 2023 | Dream Idea Machine
VIDEO:Pope.L.-Making a Commitment to Art1 June 2023 | Something Curated
Discovering Pope.L: 5 Groundbreaking Works You Need to Know6 April 2023 | The Architect's Newspaper
Gordon Matta-Clark & Pope.L: Impossible Failures at 52 Walker finds consonances between two very different artists
Past Lots
240
Pope.L
Three works: (i) White People are the Whale; (ii) Green People Don't Care What Color They Are As Long As They Get It for Free; (iii) White People are Ass
Estimate $10,000 - 15,000
Sold for $10,160
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83No Reserve
Pope.L
Trophy (Puppy)
Estimate $2,000 - 3,000
Sold for $4,788
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84No Reserve
Pope.L
Untitled (If you Could also Bring. . .)
Estimate $2,000 - 3,000
Sold for $1,260
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148No Reserve
Pope.L
Greek
Estimate $8,000 - 12,000
Sold for $5,040
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149No Reserve
Pope.L
Failure Drawing No. 1001: Boat Scene
Estimate $2,000 - 3,000
Sold for $1,386
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6
Pope.L
Failure Drawing #2 Celebrate
Estimate $4,000 - 6,000
Sold for $4,000
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98
Pope.L
<span style="font-style:normal;">Eight works:</span> (i) White People are the Beef of the Fire; (ii) White People are Hoi Vuc Vietnam 1965; (iii) White People are my Tears; (iv) Black People are a positive cancer; (v) White People are nice to their Ideology; (vi) White People are Gabriel and his Boner; (vii) White People are not White People; (viii) White People are what White People lack
Estimate £8,000 - 12,000
Sold for £21,875
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