Tickets

Pope.L The Great White Way: 22 miles, 9 years, 1 street 2001 - 2009

  • Not on view

“I get down on my belly and crawl till I’m reality,” Pope.L once said. This video documents a multipart performance during which Pope.L dragged his body along the entire length of Broadway in New York City. For each performance, he dressed in a capeless Superman costume and knit cap, strapped a skateboard to his back, and crawled for as long as he could. When the pain became unbearable, he would turn on his back and roll on the skateboard before starting to crawl again. He characterized these actions as a “response to the steady increase of street people occupying the sidewalks of New York City and the community’s refusal to recognize this calamity.”

Pope.L, whose provocative work took many forms over a career of almost fifty years, died in December 2023.

Gallery label from 2024
Medium
Video (color, sound; 6:34 min.); five inkjet prints; painted wood and metal skateboard; Superman costume; orange wool hat
Credit
Acquired through the generosity of The Jill and Peter Kraus Media and Performance Acquisition Fund, Jill and Peter Kraus, Anne and Joel S. Ehrenkranz, The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, and Jill and Peter Kraus in honor of Michael Lynne
Object number
89.2019.1-9
Copyright
© 2024 Pope.L. Courtesy of the artist.
Department
Media and Performance

Research in progress; information about this work may be incomplete.

Installation views

We have identified these works in the following photos from our exhibition history.

How we identified these works

In 2018–19, MoMA collaborated with Google Arts & Culture Lab on a project using machine learning to identify artworks in installation photos. That project has concluded, and works are now being identified by MoMA staff.

If you notice an error, please contact us at [email protected].

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].