William Pope.L

William Pope.L ( born 1955 in Newark, New Jersey) is an American visual artist, known mainly for his work in performance art, and interventionist public art. In addition, he worked artistically in the fields of painting, photography and theater. In 2002 he participated in the Whitney Biennial.

The last name Pope.L is not an artist name, but was created by Pope.Ls mother from the surname of Pope.Ls Father Pope and the first letter of her birth name Lancaster.

Training

Pope.L studied from 1973 to 1975 at the Pratt Institute and participated in the years 1977-1978 at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. In 1978 he made ​​the Bachelor of Arts degree from Montclair State University in Montclair (New Jersey). Every summer he helped severely disabled people in summer camps in rural areas. He received a Master of Fine Arts degree in fine arts from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1981.

Early work

From 1990 to 2010, Pope.L lecturer in theater and rhetoric at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. As a member of the faculty, he directed a production of Lorraine Hans Berry's A Raisin in the Sun, in which he used both African Americans and fair-skinned actors as members of the same family.

For listed in 1997 ATM Piece he tied himself with a two and a half meters long Italian sausage on the door of a Chase Manhattan Bank and wearing nothing but a skirt consisting of dollar bills. The idea was to give each customer one U.S. dollars of it when he entered the bank. However, it only took about a minute until the security intervened.

The project began eracism Pope.L during the late 1970s. It included more than 40 endurance -based performances, which consisted of " creep" in varying length. In one example, with the title Tompkins Square Crawl (1991 ) crawled Pope.L in a suit by the gutter in Tompkins Square Park, New York, while he pushed with one hand a potted plant in front of it. Another project, The Great White Way, consisted of creeping over the entire 35 km of the New York Broadway and lasted five years. For this he wore a Superman outfit and strapped a skateboard on the back. A documentation of this performance was shown at the 2002 Whitney Biennial. He attended Upper St. Clair High School, where he donated a lot of money to rebuild the school, then the school library was named after him.

From 2001

In 2001, the National Endowment for the Arts Pope.L again gave a grant of 42,000 dollars for the funding of its travel in Review project under the name Pope.L: eracism. But shortly after the announcement of this award, the acting chairman Robert S. Martin raised his approval for funding again. Joel wax, the then president of the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, said in the New York Times in its issue of December 21, it was especially given its important to remain steadfast, what he saw as an attack on freedom of expression. He wanted this exhibition, as it consider them significant. He did not want that the NEA could stop this with their decision, and urged everyone to that reported other donors. The Warhol Foundation subsidized along with the Rockefeller Foundation and the LEF Foundation, the project with $ 50,000. As a result eracism was at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art, exhibited in 2003 at DiverseWorks space in Houston, at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art ( PICA ) in Oregon and at Artists Space in New York.

In conjunction with this retrospective curator Mark Bessire the catalog produced " William Pope.L: Friendliest Black Artist in America".

In 2002 Pope.L received a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2004 he was a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2005 he traveled with "The Black Factory" ( The black factory), an art installation on wheels, from Maine to Missouri, was organized as part of The Interventionists show that the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MOCA ). Here, The Factory built in the cities each have their interactive workshop on the road and people brought objects that represent blackness for them there. The "workers" then use these objects to perform skits and thus to stimulate conversations: a stream of ideas, images and experiences. Most of the objects were photographed and thus a part of the virtual library of the factory, others came for later use in the factory archive, and some were also crushed to make new products available in the gift shop of the factory.

In 2006 he was selected as one of the fellows of the United States Artists, for which he was awarded a grant of U.S. $ 50,000.

He participated on the side of other performing artists such as Sean Penn, Willem Dafoe, Brad Pitt, Steve Buscemi and Juliette Binoche in Robert Wilson's LAB HD portraits. In 2008 was Pope.Ls piece " One Substance, Eight Supports, One Situation" selected to participate in the group exhibition " Black Is, Black Is not " the Renaissance Society.

In 2010 Pope.L was appointed as a faculty member at the University of Chicago.

Literature on William Pope.L

• Mark HC Bessire (ed.): William Pope.L - "The Friendliest Black Artist in America". MIT Press, 2002, ISBN 978-0-262-02533-1.
• The Whole Entire World: Interview with William Pope.L by Amy Horschak in Dak'Art 2006, La Biennale de Dakar: Dakar, 2006, pp. 382-383.