Critical Reviews of Carl Pope's Previous Work
Carl Pope could be the quintessential post-mainstream artist. He lives in middle America, works all over the country, operates without a gallery, and increasingly conceives his art outside conventional art-world settings. He neither has nor wants a signature style. Rather, he tailors his installations to the geography, history and issues of their particular sites, and views his art as a tool to initiate positive social change.
—Jean Robertson and Craig McDaniel, New Art Examiner
The best works in the exhibit do not seem to stop with a one-liner… A good example is Carl Pope’s installation of several dozen trophies and plaques: some are delightful examples of kitsch… The theme of police brutality is obviously important to Pope. If the piece began and ended with that issue, however, it would have only a superficial interest… What makes this work strong is its knowing innocence. As alluring as an amusement park, solemn as an altar, sweet as a Little League championship, the trophies evoke all the rewards beloved by middle America. Because the artist respects the boyish dream in the kitsch, the eruption of adult violence and racism into this careful, innocent world all the more devastating.
—Mark Stevens, New York Magazine
Joking, jabbing, mystifying, the words weave through and around the elusive subject of blackness, whether embodied in aspects of contemporary African-American culture, in half-buried histories or in forms yet to be identified and defined. The show is, in effect, a spread-out book of poetry in magnetic graphic form. The language is incredibly rich, as are the ideas and metaphors it generates. Mr. Pope has gone from writing on the body -- his own -- to writing on the mind, ours. And he's a strong enough artist to make the cumulative effects, as his work continues to develop, indelible.
—Holland Cotter, The New York Times
The Whitney Biennial is a train wreck with survivors… The video installations save this show. Their removal would trigger the equivalent of a fatal hemorrhage… Looking impressive in this arena are Dara Friedman, Carl Pope, and Ińigo Manglano-Ovalle.
—Jerry Saltz, The Village Voice
Carl Pope is doing the hard work of imagining a future for the United States at one of the bleakest times in its history. His work is at once a form of geography, reimagining and imaging the forgotten histories, people and places in America and a new psychology, creating a state of mind capable of sustaining the shocks of the present. It's soul food for the mind, in sharp contrast to the quick hit of consumer pleasure that dominates the art market, and it's all the more important for that.
—Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor
Art and Art Professions, NYU
In Carl Pope's inspired art practice, aesthetics and social critique combine masterfully across a range of media. Critical questions about blackness and gender and animus and the imagination are rendered in formal sublimity. The sensations elicited by Pope's stirring imagery and agile turns of phrase linger long after one encounters the work, as wonderment ultimately yields to something more contemplative, yet equally vital.
—Alondra Nelson, Assistant Professor
African American Studies, American Studies and
Sociology
Yale University
