Carl Pope

Carl Pope (born 1961) is a conceptual artist committed to the idea that contemporary visual art and literature can be a catalyst for personal and social transformation. Influenced by social activism, war photography, and the mainstream media’s role in the ending of the Vietnam War, Pope uses a variety of strategies to heighten public awareness to inspire individual and collective action in service to the evolution and duration of moral/ethical values, progressive human culture and the healing of the Earth’s biosphere. Since 1992, Pope received national and international recognition for producing and exhibiting trophy collections that map the history of police action killings and beatings of People of Color in the United States which anticipated the second wave of the Civil Rights Movement with the Black Lives Movement.

Pope’s recent text-based letterpress poster and billboard projects signal a return to his interests in advertising, mass media, public art, and grassroots activism. “The Bad Air Smelled of Roses” is an ongoing, endless essay about referential signs of Blackness in poster form. The issues of police brutality and the Black Freedom Struggle were explored in an iteration of “The Bad Air…” which was published in 2018 by Name Publications in the book, “The Appearance of Black Lives Matter” with Nicholas Mirzoeff and Karen Pope. Two new posters published by Lisa Martin and the Women’s Darkroom is another iteration of “The Bad Air Smelled of Roses” as an ephemeral public art project in response to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

“Carl Pope’s work is at once a form of geography, re-imagining and imaging the forgotten histories, people, and places in America, and a new psychology, creating a state of mind capable of sustaining the shocks of the present. It’s soul food for the mind, in sharp contrast to the quick hit of consumer pleasure that dominates the art market, and it’s all the more important for that.

-Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communications, NYU

Artist Carl Pope describes his installation The Bad Air Smelled of Roses (2004—) as an ongoing essay about the presence and function of Blackness in society and nature, using the advertising style of slogans as referential signs to challenge viewers’ relationship to and understanding of contemporary Blackness. For this particular silk screen and wheat paste iteration of The Bad Air Smelled of Roses at Duke University, Pope will focus on a constellation of interrelated narratives regarding the rise of the second wave of the Civil Rights Movement to inspire students to meditate on this particular time in America’s history.