Warren Ashby Residential College

John Pope and the Art of Giving

You can’t adequately sum up somebody’s life in a thousand words or less. At the same time, though, I don’t want to make John out to be a saint, or go on and on about his “courageous” battle with cancer. While I don’t think it’s too gushy to say he was saintlier than most people, he didn’t have a halo. And I don’t think John thought of himself as being brave so much as just trying to create as much art as he could for as long as he could. 

Art was what John was all about, and what I need to tell you before I write another word is that  any money from the fund will be used to support the arts or other activities at RC. John, who lived in Mary Foust from 1977 to 1979, graduated from UNCG in 1981 with a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting and printmaking. He later earned a master’s in fine arts from Boston University. He went on to paint these incredible murals and landscapes and had shows in his native Washington, D.C., area, North Carolina, Kansas and New York. I particularly love the stark highway infrastructures he painted under a grant from Boston U., and his ballparks series that stirs up memories for me of how opening day felt when I was 12. 

John also was a wonderful political cartoonist, skewering everyone from Mayor Barry to an array of lesser-known political scoundrels in community newspapers in and around D.C. But where you really get a sense of the breadth of his spirit, energy and talent is in the murals he left on the walls of various eateries in Washington and northern Virginia. If you ever get a chance to visit the Haagen-Dazs store in Georgetown, check out the panoramic history of that neighborhood’s people  and  places   that   John   finished  just before he died last October. Even as he was coming in at ungodly hours of the morning to  work on the mural before his strength sapped for the day, he was talking about his next projects. 

What else can I tell you? If you’re an RC alum who knew him you’re probably reading this and remembering what a giving, self-effacing guy John was. If you’re a more recent UNCG grad you’re probably thinking, “1977! Wow, everybody must’ve been listening to Fleetwood Mac and Elton John and going crazy over John Travolta in ‘Grease.’” Of course, that seems to be the state of the entertainment world again today. Weird. 

Anyway, how this fund works is that once we’ve raised $10,000 an endowment is established and RC will start getting 5% of that money, or $500, annually. If the sum rises to $20,000 RC will get 5% of THAT, or $1,000. Etc. It’ll be money RC can count on for activities year after year. Our goal is to raise the $10,000 within five years. It sounds very do-able to me. But then, I’m still imbued with that can-do bicentennial spirit of the Ford administration that filled the land during my freshman year. 

Dr. Lollie White
Development Office
UNCG
1100 W. Market Street
Greensboro, NC  27412-5001

Many thanks in advance for your help in honoring John’s memory while at the same time enriching a program – RC – that meant a lot to him.

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