I was happy to see in the Memorial Day edition of the Sun Journal an article about artist William Pope.L’s “Black Factory,” a mobile art installation that kicked off a national tour on the Bates campus May 24.
Pope.L, who has been a teacher at Bates and a Lewiston resident since the early 1990s, created the project, housed in a converted panel truck, to manufacture and mobilize the possibilities of difference. That is, like all of Pope.L’s work, the “Black Factory” is based on the idea that thinking about our differences can, in fact, bring us together in a campaign for a more equitable future. I hope that the article, together with the lecture by Pope.L that the Sun Journal hosted in March as part of the Great Falls Forum series, signals a newly vital relationship between Central Maine and the African-American artist, whose important ideas would certainly enrich this region.
Pope.L seems to hope so, too.
At his lecture in March, he opened by saying how glad he was to be speaking in Lewiston, since he had not had the chance to do much work here. Indeed, much of Pope.L’s work has taken place in New York City, where he spent part of his childhood. For example, in addition to the “Black Factory,” Pope.L is well known for his crawls, wherein he literally crawls through public spaces – such as Times Square – to present what he has described as a “specter of black lack” that again is meant to spur productive thinking about difference.
For one ongoing crawl, titled “The Great White Way,” created for the 2002 biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Pope.L started at the Statue of Liberty and is working his way up the length of Broadway on his hands and knees while wearing a Superman costume. He expects the 22-mile crawl, performed in segments, to take seven years.
Meanwhile, Pope.L practiced for “The Great White Way” in Lewiston, but he has never performed a public crawl here. Partly as a result, even as he has become a renowned figure in the global art culture centered around New York, Pope.L has remained comparatively unknown in this region, particularly beyond the boundaries of Bates.
Tellingly, on the two occasions Pope.L has brought the “Black Factory” to Lewiston, it has been parked on the college’s campus, and set off, in that way, from the larger local culture.
That fact is especially unfortunate because the need for Pope.L’s ideas is so acute here. Central Maine’s changing racial and social geographies have created cultural frictions that have recently erupted into flames. I’m particularly thinking, of course, of the troubling winter of 2003, which saw white supremacist groups demonstrate in Lewiston to protest an influx of African émigrés into the region.
That those fires seem to have been dampened, to some degree, by the passage of time, does not mean that the rifts they revealed and the scars they created no longer exist. Even in a state that the 2000 Census showed to be the whitest in the nation, we cannot ignore our differences and hope that they will go away.
Pope.L’s work, particularly the “Black Factory,” offers one way to get the conversation about difference restarted in Central Maine. It is an understatement to say that such a conversation that is critical to the present and future health of our community – a place where, given the French-Canadian experience of immigration in the 20th century, “factories” have always been closely connected to difference, community and culture.
This month, the “Black Factory” will bring the opportunities of difference to Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri and Kansas. My hope is that Pope.L will return from those travels with a renewed sense of what a great difference difference could make here in Central Maine, his adopted home. What would it mean for him to park the “Black Factory” on Main Street instead of on the Bates campus, or to don his Superman costume to crawl across the Veterans Memorial Bridge?
Pope.L’s critical work will not on its own solve the complex problems of racial and social justice we face, but it could begin to suggest a more diverse, more inclusive, more equitable and, indeed, better future for Lewiston, for Central Maine and for the larger world we live in.
I challenge and encourage him to insist on its local relevance.
Augustin Sedgewick is a graduate student in American and New England studies at the University of Southern Maine. His essay is adapted from a paper he presented at the “Thinking Matters: A Student Resarch, Scholarship and Creative Symposium” in April.
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