William Pope.L: Corbu Pops

The Carpenter Center presents Corbu Pops, a specially commissioned installation by multimedia artist William Pope.L. The artist conceived of Corbu Pops by engaging directly with the modernist structure of the Carpenter Center, the only North American building designed by renowned architect Le Corbusier.  

In his own words, Pope.L describes Corbu Pops as “composed of a long, low performance table containing large pots of black ooze and war hatchets with heads in the shape of the Carpenter Center. This display is lit brightly and there is super, slowed-down jazz drumming in the air sounding more like god-muttering or thunder. To one side, there is a puppet stage, with holes for performers’ heads to poke through (like ‘Bop the Gopher’), where on the opening night of the show select Harvard students will performance a chorale of grunts, groans and squeaks—a combination of Dada poetry, imitations of digital noise, Joycean linguistic liquidities, and rap void talk. A video will be made of that performance, combined with images of early Dada and Future notions of Negro-ness and Africanity, and inter-cut with an interview with Mr. Sheldon Cheek, curatorial associate at Harvard’s Image of the Black in Wester Art Research Project and Photo Archive housed at the W.E.B Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.”  

This show is organized by Helen Molesworth, the Maisie K. and James R. Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art at the Harvard Art Museums.  

Corbu Pops is made possible with additional support by the Peter Ivers Visiting Artist Fund through "Learning from Performers," a program of the Office for the Arts at Harvard University, and by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.