William Pope.L
Black Factory

Tuesday, June 27, 2006
One day only. Day long performance outside the gallery.

Monday, June 26, 6 pm
Panel Discussion on the Black Factory, Gallery 400's lecture room
Black Factory performers join Darby English, assistant professor, art history, University of Chicago and others for a conversation

The Black Factory , a mobile social service experiment, requires audience participation to do its work. The project incorporates an RV, a trailer, and a staff/performance troop who travel in the vehicle. Over the eight hour performance, the three person crew stop people on the street, feed them, cajole them and provoke them all in the name of forging a new dialogue about race and community in America. Also, during the event, audience members can browse products in the Black Factory gift shop. 100% of the proceeds from these sales are donated to a local charity.

By far the most important American performance artist today, William Pope.L has been increasingly influential in recasting the terms of artistic dialogues around identity and audience involvement. For Pope.L the point of the Black Factory is not to highlight a particular notion of black identity, but to find, encourage, and visualize places of difference, spaces for contact between individuals rather than archetypes--exposing difference to make a difference.

The Black Factory , artist William Pope.L's performance action installation on wheels, sails off on its final voyage, traveling to Chicago for a stop at Gallery 400 on Tuesday, June, 27. The Black Factory will also visit Hyde Park Art Center on June 25. Having toured the country in 2004 and 2005, these are the Black Factory's first appearances in Illinois.

William Pope.L is a multi-disciplinary installation performance artist and educator. He has garnered recent acclaim with his traveling retrospective eRacism and the accompanying monograph The Friendliest Black Artist in America from MIT Press. Pope.L is a 2005 Guggenheim fellow and is currently the featured American artist at the Dakar Biennial 2006. For further information on the Black Factory , visit the website: www.theblackfactory.com Pope.L last visited Gallery 400 at UIC in Spring 2004 for a widely acclaimed Voices lecture.

This project is suppoted in part by Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.