THE SPOT
POPE.L

  • THE SPOT

    POPE.L "THE SPOT" 2016. Courtesy Pope.L

Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw invites you, on October 24th, to a performance by American visual artist Pope.L.

Pope.L will produce and present, in October 2016, a new TV spot made especially for the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. The theme of the work is anger and conflict, human ecology, and environmental pollution. The spot is a gift to the people of Poland from a dark-skinned immigrant.


Pope.L (born 1955) is an American visual and performance artist and educator whose work investigates preconceived notions embedded within contemporary culture, and tests the rigidity of false categories. He is considered one of the most important and influential contemporary artists in the U.S. He is perhaps best known for his provocative performances, such as "Eating The Wall Street Journal" or "ATM Piece", and his decades-long series of crawls across New York City, commemorated in eRacism, a retrospective which showed at several prominent museums and galleries. His "Black Factory" project toured the East Coast and the Midwest. "Pull!", a durational city-wide community performance piece, engaged hundreds of residents of Cleveland, Ohio, to manually pull a truck for 25 miles as a testament to the power of shared labor.

He is the recipient of many prestigious grants and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, NEA fellowships, and the USA Fellowship in Visual Arts. He was most recently the focus of a solo exhibition “Trinket” at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2015). His work has been exhibited and performed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Whitney Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; New Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Renaissance Society in Chicago, among many others. Pope.L has participated in the seminal exhibitions devoted to performance in visual arts: “Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art” at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston/Studio Museum of Harlem, New York (2013), and in “Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949-1979” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1998).

Pope.L is an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. Before coming to the University of Chicago, Pope.L was Lecturer of Theater and Rhetoric at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. He earned his Master of Fine Arts from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, NJ.

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