I only met Pope.L once, when we invited him to Aspen for an artist dinner. I thought about that encounter while walking through Certainly an Act: Works on Paper by Pope.L at The Drawing Center.

When you enter the exhibition, the first wall is filled with text-based drawings about people, color, and what people are supposedly like. The language becomes nonsensical through pattern and repetition and through the absurdity of some of the words themselves. Pope.L understood how language can construct the ways we see one another, and how quickly those constructions can fall apart.

For me, some of his most memorable works were his crawls. In The Great White Way: 22 miles, 9 years, 1 street, made between 2001 and 2009, Pope.L crawled the length of Broadway in sections, wearing a Superman costume with a skateboard strapped to his back. The work grew from his thinking about homelessness, visibility, race, vulnerability, and who gets to move freely through public space.

In 2019, Pope.L expanded the idea into Conquest, organized by Public Art Fund. More than 140 New Yorkers volunteered to crawl a 1.5-mile route from the West Village to Union Square in relay. The participants reflected the diversity of the city across race, age, gender, physical ability, profession, and socioeconomic background. Strangers chose to make themselves vulnerable together, each person’s effort becoming part of someone else’s.

Standing in front of those drawings at The Drawing Center, I thought again about the crawl. Pope.L could begin with something as simple as a word repeated on paper or a body moving across pavement and use it to expose the categories and hierarchies we construct around one another. And then, with Conquest, hundreds of people willingly entered the work themselves, sharing an action that made their differences and their common humanity visible at the same time.

This is what art can be at its best.