User:Phelanperry7/William Pope.L/Bibliography

You will be compiling your bibliography and creating an outline of the changes you will make in this sandbox.

Underline = Me

short desc

William Pope.L, also known as Pope.L, was an accomplished American visual artist recognized for his contributions to performance art and  interventionist '''public art. He also created pieces in painting, photography, and theater. He was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and was the recipient of the Creative Capital Visual Arts Award, as well as a Guggenheim Fellow.[1] Notably, Pope.L was also highlighted in the 2017 Whitney Biennial for his work.'''[2]

Later work
During the year 2012, MoMA hosted an exhibit featuring various artists' works entitled "Thing/Thought: Fluxus Editions, 1962-1978." Pope.L was present for one day of the exhibit, during which he created a performative video piece. To infuse humor into his work, Pope.L collaborated with other visiting artists to select objects from two fluxkits on display and determine their placement.

In 2015 MOCA, Los Angeles presented Trinket, the largest solo museum presentation of Pope.L's work to date. The centerpiece of the show was Trinket, a monumental, custom-made U.S. flag (approximately 54 x 16 feet) hanging on a pole in the middle of the Geffen. During the museum's public hours the flag was continuously blown by four large-scale industrial fans — the type used on Hollywood film sets to create wind or rain effects — and which were illuminated from below by a bank of custom theatrical lights. Over time the flag appeared to fray at its ends due to the constant whipping of the forced air as a metaphor for the rigors and complexities of democratic engagement and participation. Trinket was originally produced in 2008 at Grand Arts, in Kansas City, Missouri, as the centerpiece of Pope.L's exhibition Animal Nationalism.

In 2015 Pope.L 	produced The Beautiful, a new choreographed crawl performance staged for the first time at Art Basel in Miami Beach. For The Beautiful, four men, dressed as Superman with skateboards strapped to their backs, roll onward in the dark. The rumbling of their wheels grows louder through speakers as they approach the crowd, and blends with the low churning of electric guitars. The ‘Super-Gents’ reach a wooden stage and crab-walk their way up, barely fitting onto the small surface. Holding each other, they finally break into a heart-rending, soulful version of the patriotic song America The Beautiful.

From 2017 to 2018, Pope.l created a work entitled "Rebus" that incorporated a diverse array of materials such as acrylic, ballpoint, chalk, felt, graphite, grommets, ink, markers, painter's tape, paper, Post-its, oil stick and towels on linen, measuring 235 × 305 cm. This was created in tandem with his "Whispering Campaign," which aimed to amplify the voices of the unseen and unheard through the use of audio.

In fall 2019, a trio of exhibitions of his work, collectively titled “Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration,” took place in New York City at the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, and the Public Art Fund. The first exhibition, "Conquest" was a communal performance piece with 140 participants who crawled on sidewalks for 1.5 mile relay style, over the course of five hours. The performance started in Greenwich Village and ending in Union Square in Manhattan. The exhibition at MoMA, "member: Pope.L, 1978-2001," in|cluded 13 early landmark performance works from the artist. At the Whitney, he created a new piece of work titled "Choir." This room sized installation featured an industrial water tank with sound landscaping from contact microphones on the pipes in the room.

Pope. L is included in the group show Black Melancholia. The exhibition curated by Nana Adusei-Poku includes 28 artists and focuses on the themes of grief and pain.

Personal life and death[edit]
William Pope.L passed away on December 23, 2023, in Chicago at the age of 68. He was survived by his son, Desmond Tarkowski-Pope.L, and his partner, Mami Takahashi.

Quotes[edit]
Pope.L's art focused on issues of consumption, social class, and masculinity as they relate to race. He is quoted as saying of his own work: “I am a fisherman of social absurdity, if you will… My focus is to politicize disenfranchisement, to make it neut, to reinvent what’s beneath us, to remind us where we all come from.”

In his Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship bio, he wrote: "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.".

In an interview with Ross Simonini, Pope.L stated that he believes the ideal way to experience a performance is to be present during the performance, as opposed to viewing photos or videos afterward. “One of the problems with time-based endurance performances like my crawl works is they have this marvelous creamy nougat center operating inside the performer, and this space is unfortunately not available in die images and mythologies that surround die work. So, typically, the surface of the work becomes the life of the work Most folks only get the neatness of the feat. How many miles? How much pain? How many people said or did not say this or that? I am not interested in that.”

Outline of proposed changes
Click on the edit button to draft your outline.