By Rivky Mondal

Photo by Zachary Cahill

August 21, 2025

The Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry will celebrate the release of Portable Gray’s 14th issue, Pope.L: The Chicago Years on Wednesday, August 27th at GRAY (2044 West Carroll Avenue). 

The special issue commemorates the life and work of Pope.L, an influential and boundary-breaking interdisciplinary artist who passed away in December 2023. The issue highlights his art and the community he built in Chicago—his role as faculty in the University of Chicago’s Department of Visual Arts, his service on the Gray Center’s advisory council, and his deep ties to Chicago’s art scene.

A leader in American performance art since the 1970s, Pope.L joined the University of Chicago in 2010. His most famous works include Eating the Wall Street Journal and the decades-long “Crawl” series—one iteration saw him crawling 22 miles of New York City’s Broadway Avenue over a half decade. Portable Gray traces his practice from the 1980s to the present, situating the Chicago years within his broader artistic trajectory.

In Chicago, Pope.L produced major works such as the Flint Water project, balancing teaching and advising students with international exhibitions. “Pope.L’s legacy at UChicago is immeasurable,” recalled Jessica Musselwhite, Executive Director of UChicago Arts. “In many ways, he perfectly embodies what makes an artist truly at home here—brilliant, engaged, unpredictable, adventurous, meticulous, and generous. Most importantly, he was an extraordinary teacher and a tremendous asset to our university community.”

Pope.L’s imprint on UChicago is indelible. After joining the Department of Visual Arts, he showed Forlesen (2013) in the Renaissance Society, followed by Brown People Are The Wrens in the Parking Lot (2017) at the Logan Center for the Arts and My Kingdom for a Title (2021) at the Neubauer Collegium. Many of the works from his 2019 Whitney Museum installation and MoMA retrospective were created in his Hyde Park studio, which shared a wall with the Gray Center.

Pope.L was integral to Portable Gray since its inception. He coined its name and helped define the Gray Center’s blending of art and academics. In his introduction, Zachary Cahill, Editor-in-Chief of Portable Gray and Director of Fellowship and Programs at the Gray Center, writes that Pope.L was “every bit as integral to Portable Gray as Derrida was to Critical Inquiry.” True to its namesake, the journal makes accessible the range of projects supported by the Gray Center, from research on revolutionary dance to the preservation of Indigenous knowledge, incubating ideas outside the pressures of “publish or perish.” 

Cahill described Pope.L’s time at the university as intertwined with the “renaissance” of art in Chicago from the 2010s through today, led largely by Black American artists on the South Side. A major impetus behind the overall work of Portable Gray, said Cahill, has been to document this swell of avant-garde production, which he likened to “Paris in the early twentieth century.” A major figure in this historic flowering, Pope.L’s art during his “Chicago Years” was in dialogue with fellow artists shaping the city’s cultural scene, including painter Kerry James Marshall and installation artist Theaster Gates, Professor in the Department of Visual Arts. Reflecting on these times, the issue features a transcript of a conversation between Pope.L and Gates about archival practice, drawn from the tenth anniversary of The Black Artist Retreat. It’s available for free in the Portable Gray issue.

The launch event will embody the Gray Center’s fusion of creative and scholarly practice, celebrating the legacy of Pope.L and engaging some of the people who knew him best. GRAY will host a conversation moderated by Cahill with Theaster Gates and artist Mami Takahashi, Pope L.’s partner, both contributors to the issue. Dieter Roelstraete, who organized My Kingdom for a Title and also a contributor, will spin a live DJ set with some of Pope.L’s favorite music. To quote Musselwhite, the evening promises to be a gathering much in the spirit of Pope.L: “vital, irreverent, and indelible.”

The event will be held at GRAY (2044 W. Carroll Ave.) on Wednesday, August 27th, 5-7pm. To register for free, click here.