Gladstone Gallery Now Represents the Estate of Pope.L, Boundary-Crossing Performance Artist
Gladstone Gallery announced it now represents the estate of Pope.L, the influential American performance and conceptual artist who died in December 2023, and plans to mount its first solo show for him in New York in 2027. Gladstone will represent the estate alongside Modern Art in London and Vielmetter Los Angeles, which represented Pope.L at the time of his death; the artist was also previously represented by Mitchell-Innes & Nash, which closed its New York space the following June. Pope.L’s best-known works include his “Crawls” series begun in 1978, notably The Great White Way, 22 Miles, 9 Years, 1 Street (2001–2009), in which he crawled the length of Manhattan in a Superman suit with a skateboard strapped to his back. His 2015 MOCA Los Angeles project included Trinket, a 16-by-45-foot US flag gradually shredded by high-velocity fans (acquired by MOCA in 2023), and his work has appeared in Documenta 14 (2017), the 2016 São Paulo Biennale, and the 2002 and 2017 Whitney Biennials—winning the Bucksbaum Award and its $100,000 prize in 2017—followed by a Whitney solo show in 2019 and a MoMA retrospective the same year.
From This Briefing
This story was covered in Restitution Reckonings and Biennale Boycott Fever