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“Why is crawling important? Well, it’s not, really. It’s just a container to place human concerns, struggle, pain, hope, a reason to get out of bed in the morning, a reason to get together. I realized that maybe this container is bigger than maybe I thought it was. In itself, the act of crawling isn’t anything special – it’s what you do with it.” — Pope.L
The artist Pope.L (b. 1955, Newark, NJ) is perhaps one of the most enigmatic artists of his generation, working in performance, installation, and sculpture, with a driving social activism front and center. With support from the Public Art Fund, Pope.L recreated and repurposed his iconic Crawl – typically having been a solo endeavor the artist initiated in the 1970s – to include a cross-section of volunteer New Yorkers, crawling across lower Manhattan in a collaborative performance, Conquest on September 21, 2019.
In this video, we follow the 140 crawlers as they trace their path from the West Village’s John A. Seravalli Playground to Union Square via Washington Square Park’s triumphal arch. We also hear from Pope.L himself (in typical fashion moving effortlessly between cryptic, poetic, and brilliant) as well as from Nicholas Baume, Director and Chief Curator of the Public Art Fund.
