NEW YORK, NY.- Pope.L brings his boundary-breaking practice to the Whitney with the debut of a newly commissioned installation, Choir (2019). For over four decades, Pope.L has used performance, painting, drawing, installation, video, sculpture, and theater to grapple with gender, race, and societal concerns. Expanding on his ongoing exploration of water, he investigates its physical properties and associations—ranging from life-giving to destructive—to find connections between this ubiquitous substance and complex social issues. Pope.L was the recipient of the 2017 Bucksbaum Award, which is presented to an artist in the Whitney Biennial. Choir opened in the Lobby Gallery on October 10, 2019 and runs through Winter 2020.

This exhibition is part of Pope.L: Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration, a trio of complementary exhibitions organized by The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Public Art Fund. Utilizing both public and private spaces, the expansive presentation addresses many elements of the artist’s oeuvre, from singular early works to a monumental new installation and a new large-scale performative work inspired by the artist’s iconic crawl series on the streets of New York City. The three exhibitions underscore Pope.L’s innovative approach to the notion of duration, the flow from moment to moment, and the process of creation, which is often made apparent in the work itself.

“We’re delighted to partner with our wonderful colleagues to present Pope.L’s pioneering work across New York this fall,” said Scott Rothkopf, Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator. “While MoMA will focus on his early career and the Public Art Fund will stage an outdoor performance, the Whitney will unveil a spectacular new installation that reveals Pope.L’s ingenious capacity to embody a range of social, historical, and emotional associations within a singular artistic gesture.”

Choir (2019) moves 800 gallons of water through pipes, tanks, pumps, and electromagnetic valves to create a murmuring, singing, crashing circulatory sonic landscape. The installation features a drinking fountain—an appliance often associated with Jim Crow segregation—that has been inverted and appears to instantly gush almost half a ton of water into a massive milky white water tank. The artist refers to Choir as an “experiment” consisting of a kinetic entity that seems to function on its own (for whom we are never told), producing an acoustical concert of filling and draining, drips and drops. Joining the unpredictable sounds of water are words and voices sourced from Library of Congress field recordings from the 1930s and African-themed Hollywood movies from the same period. Choir seeks to raise questions, compelling viewers to uncover the connections within an installation that is ever-changing physically and sonically.

Choir is accompanied by another sculptural work entitled Well, which features drinking glasses filled nearly to the brim and placed on shelves in various spaces in the Museum. While it differs in size and scale from Choir, both works address the basic human need for clean water and the resulting crisis when it is out of reach. As an artist who professes to use “lack” as material, Pope.L plays with absence and presence by creating reservoirs of varying scales that cannot be tapped and utilized.

"Water is critical to life,” says Pope.L, “yet uncritical in its interactions in the world. Water is always performing. Water always seeks its own level and, given time, dissolves almost any material with which it comes into contact. In this sense, water is a fascinating model of sociality."

Pope.L’s exploration of water is central to his recent project Flint Water (2017). Bringing attention to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, he bottled contaminated tap water collected from one Flint home and sold the resulting works of art to raise funds to aid those living in the city. Presented as a kind of laboratory meets pop-up shop at the gallery What Pipeline in Detroit, Pope.L framed the project as a way for one distressed city to help another, connecting different localities through the universal need for access to safe water. Like Flint Water, Choir demonstrates his ongoing metaphorical, political, and material investigation of water.

Christopher Y. Lew, Nancy and Fred Poses Curator, says "Choir brings together so many of his ongoing concerns, including the materiality of water, a system that is in itself a kind of performance, as well as Pope.L’s interests in noise, sound, and music. Additionally, the collaboration with MoMA and the Public Art Fund demonstrates Pope.L’s important position within contemporary art.”

The Museum of Modern Art’s presentation, member: Pope.L, 1978–2001, will feature a selection of the artist’s most critical works that range across performance, painting, drawing, installation, theater, and video. The exhibition will run from October 21, 2019 to January 2020.

Pope.L (Newark, NJ, b. 1955) is a Chicago-based multidisciplinary visual artist and educator. Pope.L began his career in the 1970s, training in performance and theater with Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks and the avant-garde theatrical troupe Mabou Mines. He studied at Pratt Institute and later received his BA from Montclair State College in 1978; he also attended the Whitney Independent Study Program before earning his MFA from Rutgers University in 1981. Pope.L embarked on one of his most celebrated crawl performances, The Great White Way, 22 Miles, 9 Years, 1 Street (2001–2009), for the 2002 Whitney Biennial. He donned a cape-less Superman costume, strapped a skateboard to his back, and crawled up the entire length of Manhattan’s Broadway—in his own words, a “public prostration in motion.”

In addition to the Bucksbaum Award, Pope.L is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Joyce Foundation Award, the Tiffany Foundation Award, the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship, the Bellagio Center Residency, Solomon R. Guggenheim Fellowship, Andy Warhol Foundation grant, Creative Capital Foundation grant, Franklin Furnace/Jerome Foundation grant, National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Artists Space grant, and more.