A headless man stares out with no eyes. An absurd study in portraiture both aesthetically and thematically coincident with Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man and rendered here in acrylic, oil pastel, marker, pencil, and tape, interdisciplinary artist Pope.L’s painting, “Portrait a.k.a The American Dream Is to Be Able to Think,” (1989–90) beckons closer attention to the fraught materiality of race which inaugurated and continues to usher this nation along.
Unadorned, bereft of a neck for fortitude, or a face one might identify, or eyes through which to see, existing as just one artwork in the Drawing Center’s sprawling posthumous Pope.L exhibition Certainly an Act: Works on Paper by Pope.L, the headless, and one might assume, brainless man appears to us here already excluded from the Dream.
Through varying assemblages of black and white — white dress shirt, skinny black tie; white words set against a grainy black background, an undifferentiated Blackness set against and within an undifferentiated America — Pope.L’s probing of the founding racial contradictions which birthed the American Dream unspools here on this 250th year with even finer provocations: If the American Dream is the ability to think, then perhaps newer approaches to thought are needed.
Upon entering the space, thought in all forms abounds as one immediately encounters two walls organized with books. On one side is an archive of 161 previous exhibition catalogues from the Drawing Center; on the other is a celebration of the Center’s 162nd exhibition “Certainly an Act,” in partnership with the Detroit-based Black Art Library. If somehow, like me, you were unfamiliar with Pope.L before the show, which brought me to Soho on a breezy August afternoon, the selected texts which populate the Black Art Library might help to shape your expectations. Boasting names such as Zora Neale Hurston and Faith Ringgold alongside titles referencing Black art, African American mythology, and so on, the Black Art Library alerted me early on that, in this show, Blackness would sit at the very center of aesthetic consideration. Inching towards the glass doors which would deliver me into the exhibition, the exhibition wall text stated that for Pope.L, “drawing was never merely a medium but a mode of thinking about the world.”
