If you know Milwaukee Film, then you probably know the artist known as Kpolly and the membership manager known as Kristopher Pollard. And if you attended this year’s film festival more than a handful of times, then you REALLY know him thanks to a pre-show ad that came attached to seemingly every single screening.

Every. Single. One.

"I really didn’t think it was going to play much," Pollard joked. "It was great; About Face did such a good job, and I got a lot of good response from it. But there’s something about seeing yourself like that over and over again, it got a little embarrassing."

Thankfully, he doesn't seem to be suffering from overexposure – at least judging by the 30 invitations he's received for dinner since the barrage of "My Dinner With Kpolly" ads. That's a good thing too, since "Slap Fights with Kpolly," his new art show featuring exactly no slap fights but plenty of star-studded portraits and comic panels of pop culture icons and more, opens Friday, Oct. 21 at Hot Pop, 201 N. Water St., with a run set through Nov. 26.

Before the opening bell rings on "Slap Fights" Friday night, OnMilwaukee chatted with Pollard about what brought him to drawing, his fascination with faces and his upcoming project all about butts.

OnMilwaukee: What really brought you to art and drawing?

Kristopher Pollard: It’s funny because I didn’t start drawing until I moved to Milwaukee. When I was a kid, I thought I wanted to be a writer, and I studied it in college when I first started there. It wasn’t until my mid-20s when I started making collages – and my collages look a lot like my drawings do now: just cutouts and big eyes pasted over smaller eyes.

So I did collages because I didn’t think I could draw. And then I moved to Milwaukee, and I had a friend named Brian who formed a group called the Wednesday Night Drawing Auxiliary. A bunch of different artists would get together and make stuff on Wednesdays, just to have a dedicated time. So I went there, and being a collage artist, you have to pack up everything and take it somewhere else, it’s kind of hard. I think I just didn’t have stuff with me one day, so I started drawing – and I kept drawing from there. 

A lot of your work deals with celebrities and icons. What about that appeals to or interests you? 

It’s honestly just people I enjoy and I’m impressed by and am a fan of – if they also, in addition to that, have faces that I like. It’s a very simple motivation: I like you, your face is interesting. Or there’s something physically interesting about you that would be fun to draw or to exaggerate or to do something with. It’s a very simple motivation. So there’s that.

As for the non-famous people stuff, that’s mostly just derived from contemporary alternative comics. Everything else is more just about creating characters and storytelling. Like when I did the "Fake A$$ Rappers" book, I enjoyed hip-hop, and hip-hop personalities can be so eccentric and over-the-top that it’s rife for over-exaggeration. Honestly, it’s not even exaggeration, because a lot of the ones I made up and drew aren’t even as over-the-top as Slick Rick, who’s a real person! (laughs)

So I just enjoy making characters and little pieces of storytelling. That’s why I like comic art and street art so much.

What makes a face interesting to you?

It’s complicated. I’ll see a lovely face, a typically attractive face that’s symmetrical – which people typically find attractive – and it’s not that interesting to draw because everything’s proportioned and everything’s even. Those faces are lovely to look at – and sometimes they’re fun to draw – but honestly, if they have anything out of the ordinary, and it might not be anything obviously out of the ordinary, it’s just fun to hone in on what those are.

I have a friend, Kat, who has a really distinct jaw line, and she’s so easy to draw. She has huge eyes and this really amazing jaw line, and those two things, I realized, immediately make that face recognizable. Even if I do a terrible job with the rest of her features, I feel like those will nail it. (laughs) It’s identifying those features that are the most interesting things that make up your cool face.

Lyle Lovett, I just drew him; he’s got one of the weirdest heads – his whole head! It’s long. He’s got the most crooked smile; it’s like someone turned his mouth. Really thin lips. A thin tall head with a mop of curly hair, and he’s got a long nose and tiny eyes and these great lines around his mouth.

He’s going to love to hear this …

He did! This is the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me. I posted it on Instagram, and it says, "Lyle Lovett is my Michael Jackson" – I immediately regretted not writing, "Lyle Lovett is my Beyonce," because that’s way clearer. But I posted it and tagged him on it – because I do follow him; I’m a big fan – and within 12 hours, he liked it and started following me on Instagram. It’ll be at the show!

About the show. Take me through "Slap Fights."

It’s very misleading. I love the title, and there is a series of drawings I’m working on called "Slap Fights," which is essentially just two people having a slap fight. (laughs) They will not be in the show though. So I named the show before I realized I did not have time to finish the "Slap Fight" pictures, but then I realized it didn’t matter. It’s just an absurd title. It stands out. It’s playful. In a sense, there are many different kinds of content in the show, so in a sense, there’s a slap fight amongst the content of my show … no, that’s a stretch.

There will be a lot of small drawings of different pop icons – everyone from Cornell West to Dolly Parton. It’s just a variety of people that I find interesting. I have a whole series of James Spaders from different parts of his career.

Why James Spader?

I love James Spader (laughs) and he’s really challenging because he has all of these wonderful quirks when he speaks and the way his head moves. His tongue kind of flits about inside his mouth, which is hard to draw – a tongue inside a mouth – and the way he turns his head.

I tried to capture a couple of them from different phases in his career, but he’s fascinating just to watch him talk, just because of how his face moves. And then obviously, in his early career, he had that massive feathered hair. And I love drawing hair in general. Feathered hair? Get out of town. So there’s like two of those from his early career where he had different phases of feathered hair, all the way up to "The Blacklist" where he had no hair.

I did one from "Less Than Zero" where I perfectly captured just a little bit of his tongue sticking out of his mouth when he has his head cocked and his eyes are just squinting. I was so proud of myself. 

Anyways, back to the show …

So that’s one part, but then I also have some larger format drawings. I did a series of comics-inspired drawings, so each individual panel is framed, but they form a little story. I have one larger one that’s just traditional four-cells. And then I have a series – I have two of them; I’m hoping to have three for the show – called "Kpolly’s Guide to Modern Dance," where I had a friend who is a dancer pose in all these dance poses, then I titled those poses and wrote a little "how it makes you feel," kind of tongue-in-cheek. I don’t draw that much movement very often, so that was kind of a change and fun. I have two of those and another one, "Kpolly’s Guide to Business Acumen," that’s a three-paneled comic.

I have a couple larger pieces too. One is a take on all of those old paintings with Pan chasing the nymphs through the forest – which always seemed really rapey to me, so I flipped it a little bit.

You have a second book coming too, "All My Friends Have Butts"?

Yeah! I just started it; it’ll probably be about a year in the making. But I loved making "Fake A$$ Rappers"; having a book of your work is really satisfying – mostly satisfying when you physically receive it. I just got like 10 huge, heavy boxes that said "Rapper Book" on them – apparently that’s how the printer labeled them – and having just a mass delivered to you like that is really satisfying.

But it was really great, and I was trying to think of something fun to do – because I really thought "Fake A$$ Rappers" was fun to create and I think it’s fun to look at; it has a good sense of humor.

And I’m a butt fan – and not in just a sexy way. I think butts are hilarious. I think they’re the most innocent of all the bathing suit areas. You can moon somebody and that’s funny; if I took my wiener out and showed it to somebody, I’d go to jail probably, and it’s not cute. So they’re sexy for sure and there’s a lot of variety and they’re hilarious and weird – and also integral for your structure. I had a pinched sciatic nerve once and could do almost nothing because of it. I immediately realized how important my ass is to do anything physical.

It is ass-ential.

That is perfect. I may steal that. But I couldn’t reach for anything. It’s your middle; it’s very important.

But what I’m going to do is recruit more than a handful of my friends to pose for regular portraits – very whimsical but traditional – and then separately do a portrait just of their butt. The part where they collaborate with me is they can choose however they want to present their butt to me.

They choose to show me a nude butt; they can wear underwear; they can wear full pants. They can present however they want, and then I’m going to draw it and then make a very ornate background for it. Treat it with the respect it deserves. (laughs)

As one who works on both the art and film sides of Milwaukee, how do you feel about the Milwaukee art scene right now?

I love it. I was unaware, before I worked at Milwaukee Film, of the rich filmmaking culture here. And I do think it has grown a lot in the last five to 10 years too; that’s what I hear from filmmakers and just seeing that Milwaukee Film had to keep adding local programs because there was so much good stuff is a testament to that. It’s a very serious group of people doing real work.

I’ve discovered that more recently, but ever since I moved here, I’ve been impressed by the arts scene here because it’s a lot of folks who don’t take the attitude of, "I’m just in Milwaukee." They’re like, "No, I’m a Milwaukee artist," and if at a particular time, there’s not a venue for their work, they’ll make one. They’ll rent a space or borrow a space and have a show, regardless of whether someone saying yes or no to them; they will say, "Yes, I’m going to do this."

I mean, I’ve seen fashion shows here. Milwaukee fashion show is not a phrase I would’ve thought of when I moved here, but I’ve seen amazing stuff. Regardless of the ignorance of the rest of the country about what we have here, we know what we have here, and there’s a lot of people just not letting outside attitudes stop them. And on a very basic level, there’s just a lot of talented people here, making a variety of work. So that’s always exciting.

What do you hope people take from your show?

I just want them to think it’s fun. I have the biggest problem writing an artist statement. I hate artist statements in general. It’s fine if your work is intellectual to write about it intellectually. My work is not overly intellectual by any means. I want my stuff to be fun. It’s not base fun; it’s not broad comedy. Some of it is interesting, and some of it is clever.

And I do try hard to make it visually challenging for myself. I work black and white almost exclusively, and that’s an immediate challenge because I have an entire spectrum I’m not using. So I have to do a lot with line and two non-colors – and I love that. So there is some challenge in the work when you look at it, but I still always want there to be some level of humor or fun or … whimsy. (laughs) I hate that word.

But genuinely, I want people to have fun at the show. I like to stand behind people and see if they laugh, if they notice little details in it.

One of the best things that ever happened to me is that I was at a show, and I did these very enlarged drawings, two of them called "Proper Ladies I" and "Proper Ladies II." They were very ornate backgrounds and these two figures with these very elegant dresses on, and one of them had a carpet that took up most of the background with a very ornate pattern.

I could see people looking at it, but what they didn’t know was that the two dresses had the butts cut out of the dresses, so you could see you were being mooned – but very subtly. You could see people distracted by the ornate carpet and then just discover that something really childish was happening. (laughs)

I think people have a perspective on the art world as pretentious and hoity-toity, but it’s often much more playful then they think.

Actually, now that we’re talking about it, that drawing is a really good way to sum up my work. It’s a fancy salon, art being taken very seriously, but underlining all of it is, "I just want to show people butts." It’s a good mix: Take your work seriously but make your work not serious.