Pope.L, the African American performance artist who died in 2023 after a career that spanned five decades, is perhaps best known for crawling on his belly down the length of Broadway dressed as Superman, or for tying himself to a bank entrance with a string of sausages, or for literally chewing on The Wall Street Journal while sitting atop an elevated toilet wearing only a jockstrap. He was the grand master of abjection, who treated the most painful aspects of poverty and racism with unflinching irony. And he didn’t stop at performance. His explorations of being poor, marginal, and stereotyped took many forms, including drawing and painting, which are the focuses of a posthumous exhibition of his work at the Drawing Center.

In Skin Sets, a series of textual works created between 1997 and 2016, Pope.L purposefully chose to work with humble materials at a humble scale: dozens of the pieces on view in the show were drafted on graph or office paper using ballpoint pen, markers, pencil, and correction fluid. Some are festooned with coffee, glitter, glue, and hair. Each drawing contains a declarative sentence, written in wobbly handwriting with the occasional misspelling, that appears to characterize a group of people based on color while subverting the implicitly racial logic of that endeavor: “White People Are the Couch and the Sofa,” “Brown People Are the Spill in the Harbor,” “Blue People Cannot Conceive of Themselves,” “Orange People Are Made of Lozenges.” Some of his funky aphorisms are beyond enigmatic, such as “Green People Are Wars Weems Lancaster Lopez Pruznick Montalto Weems Barnes and Lancaster” and “Yellow People Are the Neighborhood Behind the Chemical Plant.” Others are funny, such as “Purple People Be So Black Even the Sun Is Jealous” and “White People Are Prawns at Sunset.” A few of them contain double entendres with political implications, such as “Red People Have No Reservations.”

This sharp-witted takedown of racial categorization challenges the moralizing tendency of contemporary identity politics, according to which group identification is an essential means of empowerment—although Pope.L’s skeptical approach to racial logic doesn’t prevent him from addressing the conditions of oppression that shape the lives of poor Black people. Occupying an entire wall at the Drawing Center is one of his last works, WHA (2020–2021), an impressively large painting on wood panel that recalls the shocks to our collective psyche caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and the killing of George Floyd. Sixteen lines of black block letters stretch across a background painted in broad strokes of brown, pink, red, yellow, and blue. Some words run together, while others are missing letters, suggesting the interior monologue of someone stuttering in distress. “T THE E C COVID D ANS” appears at the top of the painting; “WHAWHAWHAPEOPLEOUTINTHESTREET/GETTINGTHEYHEADBASHED” can be discerned below. At the very bottom Pope.L leaves the viewer with a blistering statement that mocks the desire for solace in the midst of an ongoing tragedy: “FEELINGDEJECTEDWHATWOULDGEORGEFLOYDDOIFHEWASELECTED.”

The text-based pieces are the strongest in the show. One of the earliest works, Painting an Advertisement Never to Be Finished (1983–2013), a layered collage that combines print advertisements, detritus, hair, and paint, is preoccupied with the idea that consumerism can be a decoy for the existence of deeper ills in American society. The face of a white child holding a drink appears on the left, and from the right the fingers of a ghostly white hand emerge above the words “got the good.” The phrase “PALL COLOR VARIETY NO BASTARD NO PAIN NO DISTRESS DRINK UP!” is painted in large block letters over most of the surface, while much of the background is obscured by clouds of white paint.

Near the end of the exhibition there is a sizable selection of the artist’s diminutive Failure Drawings, sketched during his travels on all sorts of found materials—maps, napkins, taxi receipts, hotel stationery. They feature falling rockets, wormlike figures, and a variety of imaginary landscapes. Arranged in a continuous line around the small room, the drawings feel like a diary that captures the fleeting thoughts of an unforgettable artist who aptly called himself “a fisherman of social absurdity.”