Adrian Piper

At 75 years old, Adrian Piper physical status not available right now. We will update Adrian Piper's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

The first mention of Piper as an artist in the press was in the Village Voice on March 27, 1969, when she was only 19 years old. It was in response to what also is considered her first solo exhibition, her mail art project entitled, Three Untitled Projects. The people and institutions to whom she sent her 8+1⁄2-by-11-inch (220 mm × 280 mm) stapled booklets that comprised the piece were listed on the last page as the "Exhibit Locations". With this project, Piper succeeded in distributing her work on her own terms to an audience of more than 150 artists, curators, and dealers of her choosing.

In the 1970s, she began a series of street performances under the collective title, Catalysis, which included actions such as painting her clothes with white paint, wearing a sign that read "Wet Paint", and going to Macy's department store to shop for gloves and sunglasses; stuffing a huge white towel into her mouth and riding the bus, subway, and Empire State Building elevator; and dousing herself in a mixture of vinegar, eggs, milk, and cod liver oil and then spending a week moving around New York's subway and bookstores. Catalysis VII involved Piper visiting a museum, chewing gum loudly, and holding a purse full of ketchup. The Catalysis performances were meant to catalyze challenges that constituted the order of the social field, "at the level of dress, sanity, and the distinction between public and private acts." day. The word "catalysis" describes a chemical reaction caused by a catalytic agent that remains unchanged, and Piper viewed her audience's reaction as the unaffected agent.

Piper's Mythic Being series, started in 1973, saw the artist dressed in a wig and mustache and performing publicly as a "third world, working class, overly hostile male."

In 2013, NYU's Grey Art Gallery played footage from Piper's 1973 work, Mythic Being, in its exhibition entitled, "Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art". Piper rejected the inclusion, and requested that her work be removed from the exhibition because its inclusion further underlined the marginalization of non-White artists and was in direct opposition to the ideals that she fought to inspire in her viewers.

Piper spent the summer of 1971 in her loft in New York City. During this time, she was reading Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781). She would read this book while doing various activities. Such activities consisted of yoga, fasting and writing. However, her experience reading this led to her feeling that she was losing connection to her physical self and was disappearing. She created the work Food for the Spirit to counteract this feeling. To perform the work, she would photograph herself periodically in front of a mirror and would chant parts of the book that led her to this feeling. The works consist of 14 gelatin silver prints as part of a binder.

Between 1982 and 1984, Piper staged a series of events advertised as Funk Lessons, which invited participants to learn about the dance styles, culture, and history of funk music. Piper located the roots of funk in African tribal music and saw it as integral to the growing presence of black cultural figures in America and the ongoing struggle for equal rights. By exposing diverse audiences to the music of African American counterculture, Piper sought to create a dialogue about the cultural value of dance music and the politics of race and identity.

Each "lesson" was advertised on postcards that specifically avoided labeling the event as a work of participatory art. Piper began the lessons by playing samples of music and instructing participants in specific dance moves, while gradually introducing anecdotes of black history and culture into her presentation. Piper acted as a facilitator to discussions that, at times, grew heated as participants strayed from the academic format to engage in active discussion. By engaging audiences in active participation, Piper saw herself as creating an early work of relational aesthetics or what might be described as social practice. As documented in a video by Sam Samore, the experience transcended academic didacticism in favor of social exchange; Piper's mantra for the work was, "Get down and party together."

In 1981, Piper published the essay, "Ideology, Confrontation, and Political Self Awareness", in High Performance Magazine. In it, she details three pervasive logical fallacies that she felt contributed to constructing one's ideology: the False Identity Mechanism, Illusion of Perfectibility, and One Way Communication Mechanism. She argued that these fallacies lead to the Illusion of Omniscience, which she defined as "[b]eing so convinced of the infallibility of your own beliefs about everyone else that you forget you are perceiving and experiencing as other people from a perspective that is in its own ways just as subjective and limited as theirs."

In 2008, Cambridge University Press published her two-volume essay, "Rationality and the Structure of the Self". Volume I involves a summary of a wealth of Western philosophy, while Volume II focuses on her own interpretation of these philosophers. In Volume II, Piper argues that, without moral alienation we would be unable to forge relationships with others, or act interpersonally in the service of selfless or disinterested moral principles.

Much of Piper's work deals with issues of racial passing, racism, and gender in the United States. For example, in her 1986 performance piece, "My Calling (Card) #1", she distributed a card to anyone who made a racist comment in her presence, making them aware of her identity as an African American woman, and of how their comment made her feel uncomfortable. These cards were distributed by Piper at dinners and cocktail parties as a way for her to subtly confront racism. In an effort to challenge gender norms, Piper explored the negative associations made about a woman sitting alone at a bar and the assumption that she is seeking the male gaze. To combat these norms between 1986 and 1990 she would pass out "My Calling Card #2" to request onlookers respect her privacy and to convey that being alone does not equate to her intending to be picked up. Both of these Calling Cards were handed out to make a statement about her identity.

Racial passing is addressed in another of Piper's performance pieces, "Cornered" (1988), where in a video recording she declares to an audience, "I'm black". Piper then explains how that fact may surprise the viewer because Piper, who has a fairer complexion, could pass for White, but chooses to identify as black.

Piper's, Everything #5.2 (2004), is a piece of mirrored glass shaped like a tombstone that layers the reflection of the viewer, the text, "Everything Will Be Taken Away", and the internal structures behind the plaster of the gallery wall. The work can be seen as a means of provoking viewers to interrogate the power of institutions to determine the value of a piece of art, as well as to interrogate their own place in the world.

In The Probable Trust Registry, the piece for which Piper received top honors at the Venice Biennale in 2015, Piper asked visitors to sign contracts with themselves adhering to one of a trio of posted statements, for example, "I will always do what I say I am going to do". In a statement accompanying the award, the jury said: "Piper has reformed conceptual practice to include personal subjectivity—of herself, her audience, and the public in general." They also noted that the piece asks its audience "to engage in a lifelong performance of personal responsibility." In February 2017, the work was central to her first solo exhibition in a German museum at Nationalgalerie at Hamburger Bahnhof.

A 50-year retrospective of Piper's work, displayed on the top floor of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) from March 31, 2018, to July 22, 2018, is the first time the New York museum devoted that entire level to a living artist.

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