William Pope.L is a visual and performance-theatre artist and educator who makes culture out of contraries and confronts issues of race, sex, power, consumerism, and social class.

His extended corpus of drawings deals with the absurdities and perversities of intentional language, especially racist language and language associated with categorising and naming colour.

Black People Are Taut, Brown People Are The Green Ray, Blue People Are What We Do To Homosexuals, French People And Roma, Purple People Are The Perfect Cone For The King Not His Body, are some examples of this on-going series made by the self-proclaimed ‘friendliest black artist in America’.

This book offers a selection of drawings, made between 1997 and 2009, some sketches and two critical texts by artist and writer Iain Kerr and Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston) Helen Molesworth, as well as one of the artist’s own texts.