Today we’re taking a closer look at some of Indianapolis-based artist Carl Pope’s (b. 1961 ) work—a portfolio of broadsides produced for the installation series The Bad Air Smelled of Roses. The edition in our collection consists of 71 letterpress prints of varying dimensions (all around 56 x 36 cm) produced with wood type at York Show Prints in York, Alabama (formerly run by Amos Paul Kennedy, whose works are also represented in our collection) and Tribune Showprint in Earl Park, Indiana (“the oldest continuously operating letterpress shop in the country”) on poster and chip board between 2004-2005, nearly all of which are signed by the artist.
Pope characterizes the work, which has grown since its original iteration to include 108 posters, as “an ongoing essay about the presence and function of Blackness in society” and an exploration of the "various psychological and emotional states like forgetfulness, insanity, alienation" associated with "the poetics of Blackness." He chose to present a selection of texts drawn from a variety of sources including “modern Black literature, René Descartes, jazz and rap music, Sigmund Freud, Malcolm X, Dolly Parton, movie dialogue from Casablanca and The Matrix...” in letterpress print form because of the medium’s historical associations with marketing and political activism.
When installed in the rarified context of an art gallery or museum, as this series has now been exhibited on numerous occasions, the commercial qualities of Pope’s posters incite a productive slippage in our assumptions around high and low culture. As he puts it in a 2018 interview with Hyperallergic, “I don’t see culture as the production of beautiful paintings and works of art, you know, although culture includes that. For me the production of progressive culture is the collaborative practice with myself and other people in the world of ideals, to create and to advance human evolution... I’m not interested in using art as a tool for cultural imperialism.”