Adrian Piper

Adrian Piper (born September 20, 1948, New York, New York, U.S.) is an American conceptual and performance artist known for her provocative works that treat race, gender, class, and identity.

Piper studied art at the Art Students League of New York while she was in high school. She then studied sculpture and painting at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and graduated with an associate’s degree in 1969. She earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the City College of New York in 1974 and went on to get a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1981 from Harvard University. She spent 1977–78 studying philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. She simultaneously pursued her academic and artistic careers, teaching philosophy at a number of universities before she was appointed a tenured professor of philosophy at Wellesley College in Massachusetts in 1990.

Piper’s earliest art works emerged from the conceptual art tradition. In 1968 she met and forged a friendship with Sol LeWitt, who connected her with the New York City circle of conceptual artists. She began exhibiting her work regularly in 1969 and 1970, often in conceptual art shows. In the 1970s Piper began to explicitly address her multiracial background—both of her parents were of mixed race—and her gender in performance works. She performed confrontational pieces such as The Mythic Being (1972–81), for which she was filmed walking the streets of New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a light-skinned African American man with a mustache and an afro and wearing sunglasses. She repeated memorized phrases from her personal journals and challenged passers-by to categorize her by race, gender, and class. The piece includes photographs taken of her as her alter ego on which she inserted thought bubbles (e.g., “I embody everything you most hate and fear”).

Other notable works from the 1970s and ’80s that forefront her racial identity include Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features (1981), a drawing, and Funk Lessons (1983), a video in which she teaches students how to dance and listen to popular African American music (as a part of a 1982–84 performance series). For the series My Calling (Card) (1986–90), she typed out personal notes to people who had offended her by making assumptions about her.

In 2002 Piper founded the Adrian Piper Research Archive (APRA) in Berlin, part ongoing art project and part functioning archive of her work. Three years later, she immigrated to Germany. In addition to her prolific career as an artist, Piper self-published on her Web site such philosophical works as Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception and Volume II: A Kantian Conception (2008). The second edition of each was posted in 2013. Piper also founded The Berlin Journal of Philosophy in 2011. She taught at Wellesley College through 2008, at which point her position was discontinued when she refused to return to the United States; she believed her name was on the U.S. Transportation Security Administration’s suspicious traveler watch list and vowed not to travel to the U.S. until it was removed.

She has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships for both art and philosophy. Among her many honours are the Skowhegan Medal for Structural Installation (1995) from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the College Art Association Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work (2012), and the Golden Lion for best artist at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015). In 2018 she published Escape to Berlin: A Travel Memoir to coincide with the opening of her extensive career retrospective “Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.