An acclaimed and prolific interdisciplinary artist, William Pope.L is the recipient of many prestigious grants and awards, including the VIA Art Fund Grant, Guggenheim Fellowship, and the NEA fellowship. He is represented by the galleries: Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York and Susanne Vielmetter in Los Angeles, and was included in the 2002 and 2017 Whitney Biennial, for which he won their Bucksbaum Award. He is perhaps best known for his provocative performances, such as ATM Piece, and his decades-long series of crawls across New York City. His most recent project is The Escape—an adaptation of a nineteenth century abolitionist play by William Wells Brown staged at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Before coming to the University of Chicago, Pope.L was Lecturer of Theater and Rhetoric at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and earned his Master of Fine Arts from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.
His three-pronged project, Pope.L: Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration, is opening Fall 2019 in partnership with the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and Public Art Fund.
