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The Friendliest Black Artist in America
The MIT Press
September 2002
200 pages
ISBN: 0262025337
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography | Non-Fiction
The artist William Pope.L, who teaches at Bates College in
Lewiston, Maine, has been producing some of the most
original visual and performing art in America for many
years. But it was not until the Acting Chairman of the
National Endowment for the Arts overturned the
recommendations of the NEA's own advisory panel to support
this publication and the exhibition it accompanies that
Pope.L became the subject of feature articles in the
nation's major newspapers. Pope.L became a cause celebre as
a result of the scandal, but he deserved to be known long
before that. His work is humane, accessible, profound, and
humorous; it is also deeply challenging and self-aware. It
is neither an accident nor a joke that his business card
reads "Friendliest Black Artist in America." Many of Pope.L's pieces take place on the street. He has
eaten and regurgitated copies of The Wall Street Journal,
tied himself to a bank door and handed out money (a sort of
reverse panhandler), crawled up the Bowery wearing a
business suit, and walked down 125th Street in Harlem
wearing a 12-foot white cardboard phallus. Although he
frequently deals with racial issues, his work confounds
preconceptions of what "black art" should be. This book, which accompanies a nationally touring exhibition
of Pope.L's work, explores his impact on American art and
culture. It contains sections on practices, body,
performance, dialogue, consumption, and a selection of the
artist's writings and a chronology. The essays are by Mark
H. C. Bessire, Suzanne Preston Blier, C. Carr, Geoffrey
Hendricks, Stuart Horodner, Lowery Stokes Sims, Kristine
Stiles, and Martha Wilson.
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