Pope.L
Skin Set series, 1997 - 2011
Installation View, Certainly an Act: Works on Paper by Pope.L, The Drawing Center, New York. June 26 - September 27, 2026. Photo: Daniel Terna
text by Hank Manning
Certainly an Act: Works on Paper by Pope.L begins with a wall of confrontational declarations, including “White people are the couch and the sofa” and “Black people are the rinoceri on the tight rope.” Before we consider the deeper meaning hidden in these metaphors, we should notice as well: “Blue people are racist,” “Purple people are the color of punarchy,” and many other statements that do not correspond with any easily understood stereotypes, let alone known races. (Nor does “punarchy” appear in any dictionary I can locate.) These are, after all, pieces from Skin Sets by Pope.L, who says he is “suspicious of things that make sense.”
Pope.L
Title unknown, 2000
Collage, photocopy, pen and paint on paper.
17 x 11 inches
Across drawing, painting, photography, installation, and performance, Pope.L explores canvases from the tiny—airplane napkins—to the immense—the streets of Manhattan, producing an oeuvre that continually invites us to develop complex theorems while even simple conclusions may remain elusive. His written language can rarely be understood or found in its entirety, though at times it is clear and provocative (“Dogs are useless”). He makes art with food, like ketchup and peanut butter, and although the exhibition is subtitled Works on Paper, there are also dozens of portraits on Pop-Tarts. He depicts paramount historical figures in unfamiliar forms and settings, as in Harriet Tubman Spins the Universe, wherein the abolitionist’s legs swirl in perpetual motion. Viewers inevitably feel like part of the experiment—recalling Marcel Duchamp’s assertion that the spectator who interprets the work brings it into posterity.
Pope.L
Relational Painting a.k.a. if Black is Beautiful…, 2003 - 2022
Installation View, Certainly an Act: Works on Paper by Pope.L, The Drawing Center, New York. June 26 - September 27, 2026. Photo: Daniel Terna
The second room prominently features a multimedia environment, Relational Painting a.k.a. if Black is Beautiful…, constructed over twenty years and containing a long shopping list of materials, starting with paint and marker, but also featuring amplifiers buzzing, cigarette butts, bottles, and a book by W.E.B. DuBois. It looks like a replica of a madcap artist’s studio, with a painting in progress, as if to demonstrate the environment in which he made the other pieces around the room. Photographs of the installation hang in the installation itself.
Pope.L’s Failure Drawings best exemplify one interpretation of the exhibition’s title—that drawing is Certainly an Act. These small pieces appear on various materials at hand—letters, hotel notepads, medicine boxes, receipts—as if he had an impulse to draw, with no time to get to a studio. In contrast to this urgency, however, are his reminders that visual art is a durational performance too—all include multiple dates indicating when he began and then continued work on them, often years apart.
The use of everyday items as mixed media attests to the artist’s belief that the division between art and life is porous. Complementing this reminder, we’re invited to watch a few highlights from the artist’s subversive public performances that most convincingly portrayed this ambiguity. For the Crawl series, he donned a business suit and held a potted plant (or in a later rendition, a Superman costume and a skateboard on his back) while strenuously maneuvering on all fours across Manhattan; surely few passersby could have recognized it as a staged act at all. In Alzheimer’s Talk, he sits behind a COVID shield as a phone repeatedly rings and a man offscreen punches him. Maybe his work seems difficult to understand because the same is true of life itself.
Pope.L
Tompkins Square Crawl, 1991
Perhaps most startling, we hear Pope.L speaking enthusiastically about Conquest, a group performance of Crawl with 140 volunteers—and making perfect sense. The earlier crawls, like much of his work, were intentional social critiques; at the peak of a housing crisis, they effectively brought attention to the humanity and suffering of the unhoused. His soft-spokenness and words of encouragement while engaging the public also suggest that alongside the mind which produced the natural disasters, body horror, and anthropomorphized penises throughout Failure, his self-identification as “the friendliest Black artist in America” is not entirely ironic.
Certainly an Act: Works on Paper by Pope.L is on view through September 27 at the Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, New York