Since his now renowned ‘crawl’ performance in Times Square in 1978, Pope.L’s work has been widely venerated for its critique of economic and racial injustices. Across performance, street action, painting, video, installation, and sculpture, it has provided a framework to think about relations and power disparities in race, language, gender, communities, and the environment. “My focus is to politicize disenfranchisement, to make it neut, to reinvent what’s beneath us, to remind us where we all come from,” he once stated. Pope.L’s earliest performances in public spaces brought together influences from absurdist theatre, Fluxus, and conceptual art in such works as Eating the Wall Street Journal (1991) in which he chewed and spat out pages of The Journal with milk and ketchup, while sitting atop a toilet-cum-throne. His early street performances were also the beginnings of what became his decades-long crawl works, which involved crawling long, exhausting routes across city streets, often dressed in formal attire. This iconic series has continued to be performed in various iterations, sometimes by Pope.L himself and other times with large groups of performers. The body politics activated by this work are present in various forms throughout Pope.L’s oeuvre. Other notable works include his Flint Water Project (2017), in which he bought 150 gallons of tap water from the city of Flint during the public health disaster in which large numbers of the majority Black population became sick from its contaminated water. Pope.L rebottled this water and sold it as limited editions with the income donated to relief efforts in Flint and Detroit. The political backdrop of this project carried over into Pope.L’s more recent Choir (2019), a three-part work that brought together threads from his Flint water project with references to public drinking utilities used in the era of Jim Crow segregation.

William Pope.L (1955-2023) was born in Newark, NJ, and he lived and worked for most of his life in Chicago, IL. Pope.L began to work as an artist in the 1970s, studying at Pratt Institute and Montclair State College, where he gained a BA in 1978. He was a participant of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in New York in the late 1970s and received his MFA from Rutgers University in 1981. Since the 1980s, his work has been exhibited extensively both in the USA and internationally. Pope.L’s early performances took place in public space, on the street. He then began to exhibit in venues as Anthology Film Archives in New York; the 2002 Whitney Biennial; Franklin Furnace in New York, among others. His work has been shown in exhibitions and performances at such institutions as Museum of Modern Art, New York; New Museum, New York; The Sculpture Center, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; CAM, Houston; Studio Museum Harlem, New York; Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; Artists Space, New York; the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo; Artspace, Sydney, among many others. Pope.L’s final museum exhibition during his lifetime recently took place at the South London Gallery, which presented a large-scale survey exhibition of Pope.L’s work.

During his career Pope.L received a number of important awards and fellowships, including the Bucksbaum Award, Joyce Foundation Award, the Tiffany Foundation Award, the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship, Solomon R. Guggenheim Fellowship, Andy Warhol Foundation grant, Creative Capital Foundation grant, Franklin Furnace/Jerome Foundation grant, National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, among others. Pope.L taught extensively and was a faculty member of the University of Chicago from 2010 until 2023.