Pope.L

(1955–2023)

Pope.L’s sculptures, photographs, paintings, and performances are trenchant, vulnerable, and often absurd dissections of race, consumerism, attention, and language. His art aims to “politicize disenfranchisement, to make it neut, to reinvent what’s beneath us,” in his own words. Pope.L’s work destabilizes the desire for stable understandings of identity and cultural icons—leaving an American flag to be destroyed by industrial fans in his 2015 MOCA Geffen show, for example, or whiting out the eyes of a mask of President Obama in 2023. Pope.L lived in Chicago for over a decade, teaching in the University of Chicago’s Department of Visual Arts from 2010 until his death in 2023. The campus has hosted several prominent exhibitions of his work, including Forlesen (2013) at the Renaissance Society, Brown People Are the Wrens in the Parking Lot (2017) at the Logan Center, and My Kingdom for a Title (2021) at the Neubauer Collegium. For the 2012–13 exhibition Wall Text, Pope.L produced Cliff, a site-specific work that remains on view in the Logan Center tower’s windows.