Modern Art has opened Pope.L: Selected Works 1978–2022 at its Bennet Street space in London, on view 13 October to 14 November 2026. The show gathers sculptures, paintings and drawings spanning five decades, with several of the artist's hallmark performances screened in a specially designed room — his first London solo since his death in December 2023.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1955, Pope.L built a practice that dissolved the boundary between art and life, amplifying what he called the dynamic of pain, loss, joy, radicality and possibility in the experience of being Black. His best-known works were feats of endurance staged in public. In 1978, wearing a pinstripe suit with a bright yellow square sewn to the back, he crawled along Manhattan's West 42nd Street in Times Square Crawl a.k.a. Meditation Square Pieces — the first of more than thirty crawl performances confronting the overlooked realities of racial and class inequality. Years later he put his ambition plainly: "If I crawl long enough I'll get company."

Other performances used absurdity and discomfort as critique. In Eating the Wall Street Journal (2000), he doused himself in flour and chewed and spat out pages of the newspaper, lubricated with milk and ketchup. These works foregrounded his engagement with the socially marginalised and what the gallery calls the delirium of the American dream. A student of Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks and a participant in the theatre group Mabou Mines, Pope.L carried conceptual art's strategies into street, gallery and institution alike.

Institutional recognition arrived late but in force: in 2019 he was the subject of major solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, presented concurrently. His first British institutional solo followed at the South London Gallery in 2023, completed just weeks before his death, and this June The Drawing Center in New York presented a survey of his works on paper. In March, Gladstone Gallery announced it would represent his estate, alongside Modern Art in London and Vielmetter in Los Angeles, which had represented him during his lifetime.