The Chicago-based artist Pope.L is having a New York City moment.

Last month, the Public Art Fund staged an outdoor performance where participants crawled (on their hands and knees) across downtown Manhattan; currently, the recently reconfigured Museum of Modern Art is exhibiting a retrospective of his work. And at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a new installation that explores water has taken over the lobby gallery.

Pope.L, 64, has spent his career thinking about race and class, and over the past few years, he's been increasingly concerned about access to clean drinking water. A 2017 work "What Pipeline" bottled contaminated water from Flint, Michigan, and sold it as part of an exhibit — with the proceeds going to non-profit organizations serving residents there.

This latest piece is more metaphorical. The lights in the gallery space off the lobby are dimmed, with a giant, milky-white water tank spotlit off to the side. Above it hangs a boxy, refrigerated drinking fountain from the 1960s or so. It's upside down.

"He's making reference to segregation-era drinking fountains," said Whitney curator Christopher Lew. "It's a midcentury fountain that's turned upside down and water is gushing through it, so literally he's taking this dark terrible moment of American history and flipping it on its head."

Lew said that 900 gallons of water circulates through the fountain, the tank, and a set of copper pipes that line the center of the room and angle up to form a doorway for visitors to walk through. "He knows it's a privilege working with so much water as an artist," Lew said. That's seems to be part of the idea, for viewers to reflect on the abundance of water in this highly privileged space.

The sound of that much water, of course, can be soothing — think waterfalls. But Pope.L has counteracted that pacific feeling by adding a soundtrack of distorted field recordings from the 1930s combined with walkie-talkie squawks and old Hollywood clips of films that took place in a mythical Africa. The result is loud and monumental and disturbing.

In the recording for the Whitney's audio tour, the artist says that he wanted it to be like "walking into a puzzle of sound." Sometimes what is happening in the audio is clear — but often it is not.

Also in the tour, Pope.L says he is fascinated by the ways in which water takes the shape of the container that it fills. "It goes where it's needed," he says. 

Then he pauses. "I guess with man's intervention, probably not." He remembers as a child seeing different fountains set aside for blacks and whites. "If it was up to water, water would go where it was needed."

"Choir" will be on display at the Whitney Museum through January.