Skin Set Drawing: Blue People Are The Future by William Pope.L

Skin Set Drawing: Red People Are From Mars Green People Are From New Jersey by William Pope.L

Skin Set Drawing: White People are the Future by William Pope.L

It's an amazing thing to have the opportunity to work with someone like William Pope.L— his work is exhibited internationally, widely acclaimed and frequently awarded some of art's highest honors—but it's also a huge challenge. In part because his work is provocative—with such provocation easily escalating into controversy—and often performance-based, making it even more difficult to convey the ideas around his practice within the confines of two dimensions.

But Pope.L knew right away that he wanted to create new, original drawings from his Skin Set Drawings to be the basis of these 20x200 editions. As I've become more familiar with his practice, it's easy to see why. The core concepts that drive his work—ideas about identity, especially race—are deftly illustrated here, challenging the viewer to confront a topic that's incredibly uncomfortable. (That the art world amplifies that discomfort isn't exactly subtext.)

What's engaging, and uncomfortable, about these editions is how pointedly they illustrate the incredible charge of the words "white" and "black." The two smaller pieces—Blue People Are the Future and Red People Are from Mars Green People Are from New Jersey—talk about the color of people in such fantastical terms. Green, red and blue suggest the absurdity of describing humans as either black or white, while reinforcing how incredibly powerful it is to attribute any characteristics to people thus identified.

Not quite sure what I mean? Cycle through the sentences he has depicted throughout the drawings' history and see how squirmy you get as you encounter these bold pronouncements about what people are (or are not). The ones describing black or white people have a sense of intentional confrontation. Certainly there's no small perversity in the idea of a white person buying a work by a black artist entitled White People Are the Future—buying it, and (hopefully) displaying it, but the other more imaginatively colored humans convey their perversity in more subtle ways.

Pope.L's work confronts its viewers with a hard truth, one that I wish people were more accepting of: Everyone is racist. To proclaim that you're not shuts the door on a much more difficult, nuanced conversation. But, ultimately, it's the only conversation that holds any promise of progress being made to confront and/or defeat the corrosive effects of racism.

— Jen