Since his first ‘crawl’ in Times Square in 1978, Pope.L was venerated for his incisive and subversive critique of social, racial and economic injustices. “My focus is to politicize disenfranchisement, to make it neut, to reinvent what’s beneath us, to remind us where we all come from,” he once stated. Working across performance, street action, painting, video, installation, and sculpture, he delivered an unflinching picture of the disparities and stereotypes that continue to define the world today. By donning a business suit and “giving up his verticality” in the 1978 work, he made New York’s homelessness crisis impossible to ignore. For Eating the Wall Street Journal (2000), he mounted an elevated toilet dressed only in a jockstrap before reading, ingesting, and subsequently regurgitating strips of the Wall Street Journal. As scholar Tavia Nyong’o has observed, “Pope.L’s ‘crawl’ pieces and his Eating the Wall Street Journal interrupt the bodily habitus of power, privilege, and able-bodiedness.” Pope.L’s works intersect a broad array of themes and concerns including spatiality and the vulnerable Black male body, physical and emotional discomfort, language, (in)visibility, eroticism, filth, and abjection. He confronted these ideas with seriousness and absurdist humour.

Pope.L was born in 1955 in Newark, New Jersey, and died in 2023 in Chicago. He received his BFA from Montclair State College (1978), later attending the Whitney Independent Study Program before completing his MFA at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in 1981. In 2002 a travelling survey, William Pope.L: eRacism, was organised by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Maine College of Art. The same year, he performed The Great White Way, 22 miles, 5 years, 1 street, by crawling twenty-two miles up Broadway from Lower Manhattan’s Financial District. From 2019-20, his work was the subject of a group of complementary exhibitions organised by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Public Art Fund. Recent solo exhibitions include Pope.L's first institutional solo show in the UK at the South London Gallery (2023); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2022); Modern Art, London (2021); La Panacée, Montpellier (2018); and the Geffen Contemporary at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2015). He has participated in recent group exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2021); the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2019); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (2019); the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2019); and the Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau (2019). Pope.L’s works are held in collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Bronx Museum of Arts; ICA Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.