William Pope.L

William Pope.L (1955–2023) was an American artist, performer, and writer whose work engaged race, class, visibility, and the social body through performance, installation, drawing, and text. Known for his endurance crawls — including The Great White Way (2002–ongoing), in which he crawled the length of Broadway in a Superman costume — Pope.L developed a practice in which the body becomes a site of proposition, comedy, and critique simultaneously. The Black Factory (2004–ongoing) extended this logic into a mobile social project: a truck-based operation that collected, transformed, and redistributed objects associated with blackness. His work resists neutralisation by any single interpretive frame.

  • William Pope.L — some things you can do with blackness…, Kenny Schachter Rove, London, 2005. Front cover. Deep red ground. Centre: close-up photograph of a small black bear-like sculptural object, heavily textured surface with white dust or residue, suspended or resting against two white diagonal rods. White serif title text lower centre: "William Pope.L / some things you can do with blackness…" William Pope.L — some things you can do with blackness…, 2005 — interior plate, p. 5. Skin Set Drawings, 2002–2004. Four colour drawings on grid paper, each filled edge to edge with large hand-lettered text: upper left, purple on white: "RED PEOPLE ARE A NOVEL SET IN THE HEAD OF A WATERMOCCASIN"; upper right, yellow-green on white: "YELLOW PEOPLE ARE A TEA OF SANITY"; lower left, black on white: "RED PEOPLE ARE A LIQUID IN A BEAKER IN A LAB IN MANCHESTER ENGLAND"; lower right, blue and green on blue: "BLACK

    William Pope.L — some things you can do with blackness…, Kenny Schachter Rove, London, 2005

    William Pope.L — some things you can do with blackness…, Kenny Schachter Rove, London, 2005