Gladstone Gallery now represents the estate of Pope.L, the boundary-crossing artist whose performances and conceptual art left an indelible mark on contemporary art. The gallery will mount its first solo show for the artist in 2027 in New York.
Gladstone will represent Pope.L with Modern Art in London and Vielmetter Los Angeles, which both represented the artist at the time of his death in December 2023. (At that time, Pope.L was also represented by Mitchell-Innes & Nash, which closed its New York space the following June.)
“Pope.L was a ground-breaking visionary artist in his lifetime,” Gladstone director Julian Ehrlich said in a statement, “and since his untimely death, his vast impact and influence have come into higher relief and only continue to grow. We feel so privileged at Gladstone to be a part of continuing his legacy.”
Over the course of four decades, Pope.L produced a body of work that was often hard to classify, but that at its core dealt with the experience of Black Americans. His most well-known performances involved him eating the Wall Street Journal or traversing sections of New York on hands and knees.
Pope.L, Eating the Wall Street Journal (street version) from How Much is That Nigger in the Window, 1991, performance still.
Photo James Pruznick/©The Estate of Pope.L/Courtesy the Estate and Gladstone
He first started his “Crawls” series in 1978, but his most famous one, conducted in parts from 2001 to 2009, saw him crawl the length of Manhattan while wearing a Superman suit and having a skateboard strapped to his back. The Great White Way, 22 Miles, 9 Years, 1 Street, as that work was called, nodded to “the difficulty of achieving freedom while also indirectly hinting at an exploration of the racism that hinders that quest,” as Alex Greenberger wrote in Pope.L’s ARTnews obituary.
In 2015, he memorably staged an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles that included Trinket, a 16-by-45-foot US flag that, over the course of the exhibition, was eventually frayed and torn apart from a number of high-velocity fans being blown at it. MOCA acquired the work in 2023. His work is also held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art.
Pope.L, Trinket, 2008/2015, installation view, at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2015.
©The Estate of Pope.L/Courtesy the Estate, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Gladstone
His work has been included in major exhibitions including Documenta 14 in 2017, the 2016 São Paulo Biennale, the 2002 and 2017 Whitney Biennials, with his work in the latter edition winning him the prestigious Bucksbaum Award, which comes with $100,000. Following that win, he had a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 2019, the same year as his MoMA retrospective. An exhibition surveying his works on paper will open at the Drawing Center in New York this spring.
“Pope.L defied boundaries with his innovations across visual, performance, and conceptual art,” Gladstone senior partner Max Falkenstein said in a statement. “His work left a profound mark on culture at large, shaping and inspiring a wide community of artists working today. We are proud to represent his legacy and ensure that his impact continues to be recognized and celebrated.”
Correction, March 31, 2026, 12:50 p.m.: An earlier version of this article misattributed a quote from Julian Ehrlich to Gavin Brown.
