This past October, more than 400 people gathered at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts to celebrate the life and work of internationally renowned artist Pope.L (1955–2023).
Pope.L, who joined the University as a professor in the Department of Visual Arts (DoVA) in 2010, called himself “The Friendliest Black Artist in America,” a term he copyrighted. A conceptual and performance artist who explored many forms of media—drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures, writings, and more—he made provocative, often humorous work that resists easy interpretation.
Most famously, for his multiyear performance art piece The Great White Way: 22 miles, 9 years, 1 street (2001–9), Pope.L crawled the entire length of Broadway, Manhattan’s longest street, while wearing a Superman costume.
“Pope.L is something of an escape artist for those of us who compulsively want to know what a given artwork is about,” says Dieter Roelstraete, curator at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, who worked closely with Pope.L on several installations and cotaught a course, Art & Knowledge, with him.
Even his name, Pope.L, seemed designed to confuse. In fact, it was a portmanteau of the artist’s original surname and the first initial of his mother’s.
The two-day event CAMPAIGN: A Celebration of Pope.L included an exhibition of works he created during his years at UChicago. Among them: Cliff (2012), a permanent mural on the windows of the seventh, eighth, and ninth floors of the Logan Center. The mural consists of a mountainous landscape and the words “On Strike for Better Schools.”
“It’s a beautiful conceit,” says Zachary Cahill, MFA’07, CAMPAIGN co-organizer and director of programs and fellowships at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, “to look out through the windows onto the city and think about that statement.”
Another work installed for the memorial was The Whispering Campaign (2016–17), a sound piece Pope.L originally created for the art fair Documenta. (The memorial was called CAMPAIGN to reference “his pervasive use of the word in his work the last five or six years,” says Roelstraete.) A loudspeaker was installed in a second-story window of Lorado Taft’s Midway Studios, directed at the Logan Center’s courtyard. The speaker played a recording, over and over, very loudly, of someone whispering, “Ignorance … is … a … virtue.”
“Very incantatory” is how Cahill describes it. “He was making a case for not knowing, I guess. Starting from a place of not knowing.”
In the context of a research university, “It’s a provocation,” Roelstraete says. “He was a provocateur. ‘A fisherman of social absurdity,’ as he was once described.”
The events of the first day of CAMPAIGN included “Show, Tell, and Ignore,” a talk by Roelstraete and Cahill about objects and materials Pope.L used in his art. He often repurposed the foods of his childhood—white bread, peanut butter, milk, ketchup—to create his works, which were characterized by “have-not-ness,” in Pope.L’s terminology.
During their talk, Roelstraete and Cahill would show an object Pope.L had used, talk about it, and then suggest, “in the spirit of Pope.L, that the audience now ignore everything we just said,” Roelstraete says. “Because, of course, we may have been dead wrong.”
A party called simply “Tacos and Beer” concluded the evening. “We wanted joy,” says organizer Zespo, MFA’18, program administrator of DoVA’s Open Practice Committee. “We didn’t want stuffy. Pope.L didn’t like stuffy.”
The organizers of CAMPAIGN also wanted to make space for the hundreds of students Pope.L had taught. So the second day featured a “collective sharing of memories of Pope.L as a teacher and mentor,” according to the program.
Like “Show, Tell, and Ignore,” the event was done “in the spirit of Pope.L,” says Zespo, who, like Pope.L, uses one name. “Writing was very important, structure was very important—how you obey the structure and break the structure.”
Alumni were invited to submit memories in writing, with a 200-word limit. Their memories were read aloud by other attendees at the event—an homage to the collaborative method of Pope.L’s Hansel and Gretel Theater Workshop. Students in the workshop wrote, directed, and acted in their own version of Hansel and Gretel (a story also characterized by have-not-ness; under Pope.L’s guidance, the play that resulted was very bleak). “We would write a scene, but then we would give it up,” says Zespo, who took the course as a graduate student, “and other people would act in it.”
A number of submissions mentioned the expression “wrong and strong,” something Pope.L often said to his students in studio visits, during class, over email, and in written feedback. Once a student was ready to “embark on a creative journey to respond,” Zespo says, Pope.L would encourage them to “do it wrong and strong.”
One DoVA graduate sent in a memory about sitting in on a Chicago Booth course on nonprofit arts leadership. Of all the works in Chicago Booth’s large art collection, the Booth students ranked Pope.L’s piece—a teddy bear coated in paint and peanut butter—dead last on a list of those they liked. The professor announced the ranking, then brought in Pope.L as a guest speaker. “Unshockingly, he was utterly himself. He was completely unbothered that the class disliked his work.”
Another DoVA alumnus remembered showing Pope.L a sculpture he felt particularly proud of. “Without even giving me a chance to explain my big, fancy ideas, Pope.L picked it up off the floor … propped it vertically in a corner, and said, ‘Why don’t you install it this way?’ without any sort of reasoning. Honestly, I was annoyed. … But I did end up agonizing over his intervention and changing my original installation plan. I still think about this moment constantly as an artist and a teacher. Nothing is ever ‘done’ until I know exactly how I want to show it to the world.”
“I’m (still) mad you are gone,” wrote another former student. “How and why. But the Ideas remain, swirling around. Thankfully.”
This spring the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry will publish a special edition of its publication Portable Gray, a name Pope.L coined, dedicated to him and his work. Titled Pope.L: The Chicago Years, the issue features contributions by Theaster Gates, professor in Visual Arts; Laura Letinsky, professor in Visual Arts; W. J. T. Mitchell, the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of English and Art History; Tina Post, associate professor in English Language and Literature; Dieter Roelstraete; Zespo; Pope.L’s partner Mami Takahashi; and others.