Highlight an artist of interest that relates to your work. Provide the following information:
- Artist Biography and brief explanation of work (can use quotes from critics or galleries)
William Pope.L
1. William Pope.L is a prominent multidisciplinary artist known for his conceptual, often performance-based art practice, which actively confronts issues of race, sex, power, consumerism, and social class. As the self-proclaimed “friendliest black artist in America,” Pope.L invites dialogue through provocative performances, installations, and art objects. He is best known for a series of more than 40 “crawls” staged since 1978 as part of his larger eRacism project, in which he inched his way through busy city streets on his belly, back, hands, and knees in an attempt to draw attention to the plight of those members of society who are least empowered.
At the center of Focus: William Pope.L—the artist’s first solo show at a major museum—is a selection of approximately 50 works from Pope.L’s ongoing series, Failure Drawings. Created only when he is traveling with whatever materials he has on hand, these intensely personal works reveal compelling mood shifts. Taken as a whole, Failure Drawings constitute an unexpectedly structured project within Pope.L’s famously unfettered body of work, suggesting that the discipline of drawing provides the opportunity for introspection and private exploration. As suggested by the title, the overall sentiment of the series is melancholic. Yet, humor is also an essential “material,” providing a path to the sort of communication among strangers from which positive change so often occurs.
Exclusively for this exhibition, Pope.L has also conceived a “live drawing.” Made with a combination of organic materials and more traditional oil paints, charcoal, and pigment sticks applied directly to the gallery wall, the image is intended to change form over time. Prompted by the artist’s response to prominent Chicago personalities and the city’s history, this drawing and its meaning are, like so much of his work, insistently open ended. “You can hold contraries, bound together, without blurring them together,” wrote Pope.L about his work. “The fact is I am black and I am influenced by historically European-based art. I am interested in formal issues and I am interested in social issues. Think of it as a bunch of flowers—daisies, lilies, daffodils. I want you to hold them all in a bundle but see them each distinctly.”
William Pope.L was born in 1955 in New Jersey. He currently lives in Lewiston, Maine, where he is a lecturer on theater and rhetoric at Bates College. He received his M.F.A. from Rutgers University in New Jersey, and studied at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Pope.L has called himself the “friendliest black artist in America,” a designation that became the title of a 2002 book on his works published by MIT press. His work has been exhibited and performed at venues including the Art Institute of Chicago, The Whitney Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), and Artists Space, among others.
- 4 images and / or video/sound clips of artwork
- a link to an interview with the artist or a review
http://www.kgbbar.com/lit/cityscape_at_a_/inside_the_blac.html
http://www.researchchannel.org/prog/displayevent.aspx?rID=2047&fID=571
- link to gallery representing artist
-artist website
http://www.theblackfactory.com/
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