Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Dissertation - Restricted Access (SIA Only) - With Distinction

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Contemporary Art

First Advisor

Juliet Hacking

Second Advisor

Leo Krakowsky

Abstract

This dissertation examines William Pope.L’s crawl performances as radical interventions within the urban fabric of New York City—performances that disrupt the vertical logics of neoliberal space and propose a poetics of vulnerability, exposure, and collective becoming. Moving beyond frameworks rooted in identity politics alone, the study situates the crawls within a critical constellation of post-Black art, performance studies, affect theory, and urban theory. It argues that Pope.L’s horizontal, low, and slow gestures stage the body as both a site of dispossession and a call for ethical encounter: an insurgent form of citizenship that reconfigures public space and reimagines the terms of the political itself. Through dialogue with thinkers such as Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière, Brian Massumi, José Esteban Muñoz, and Rosi Braidotti, the thesis explores how the crawls activate minor, micropolitical events that seed the possibility of new modes of relationality and care. Attention is given to the documentation and temporality of the crawls, their engagement with the coercion of the gaze, and their potential to produce microcommunities founded on shared precarity rather than fixed identity. Ultimately, the inquiry aims to study Pope.L’s performance practice as embracing a structural vulnerability that allows us to reimagine a community built on its very exposure and fragility.

Distinction

1

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