Coinciding with the week 2 drop of the Fall 2022 collection, Supreme presents its collaboration with U.S. artist William Pope.L.
Born in 1955 in Newark, he is currently a professor in the visual arts department at the University of Chicago, the city where he precisely works and lives.
Pope.L owes his notoriety primarily to his performances that began to interest him, as well as experimental theater, while attending Rutgers University. However, he is not limited exclusively to performance-art but works indiscriminately with photography, video, sculpture and writing. His works are described as provocative, absurd, and disruptive, showing a particular interest in the role of objects in contemporary society and in our daily lives, unearthing their symbolic power.

Alongside this research, the artist combines reflections on racial issues, examining the ideas of blackness and whiteness and showing the prejudices and violence that arise from a culture of racism.
Pope.L’s most famous and well-known works refer to his crawls. A series of street performances made over 40 years, beginning along 42nd Street in 1978.
Inspiration came from the steady growth in the number of homeless people sleeping along the streets of the Big Apple, focusing on what is the horizontal movement of bodies and his body.
“All those folks, who seemed inert and unwilling to lift themselves up by their bootstraps, starting to move as one”, Pope.L. stated.
Between 2001 and 2009 he crawled a full 22 miles down Broadway, starting at the tip of Manhattan and arriving in the South Bronx wearing a Superman suit and a skateboard strapped to his back.

“As soon as you go outside, there’s this issue of where you are in space, and who owns that space…So I realized that I was setting up a tension when I crawled about being in space and how you’re located in that space – how you’re supposed to behave in that space, and who can own that space, and how you can own it”.

Supreme has created a special collaboration with the artist that consists of a T-shirt and two decks, featuring some of the striking images from Pope.L.’s performances and works.
The William Pope.L x Supreme Fall 2022 collaboration will be released on September 8 and will be available online and at Supreme stores.

