Adrian Margaret Smith Piper

Background

Adrian Margaret Smith Piper was born on September 20, 1948, in New York City, to Daniel Robert and Olive Xavier (Smith) Piper.

Education

In 1969, Adrian received an Associate of Arts from School Visual Arts. Then, in 1974, she received a Bachelor in Philosophy from City College of New York and a Master of Arts from Harvard University in 1977, and then, in 1981, Adrian received a Doctor of Philosophy. From 1977 to 1978, she also attended the University of Heidelberg.

Career

Piper 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.

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.

Achievements

• Adrian Piper is a conceptual and performance artist known for her provocative works that treat race, gender, class, and identity.
  
  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.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Out of Order, Out of Sight, Vol. I: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968-1992

    (Out of Order, Out of Sight is an artistic and intellectua...)

    1996
  • Out of Order, Out of Sight, Vol. II: Selected Writings in Art Criticism 1967-1992

    (Adrian Piper joins the ranks of writer-artists who have p...)

    1996
  • Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography of an Art Object 1974
  • Colored People: A Collaborative Book Project 1991
  • Decide who you are: Texts 1992

Views

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.

Membership

Adrian was a member of the North American Kant Society, American Philosophical Association, American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, American Association of University Professors, Society for Philosophy and Public Affairs, Phi Beta Kappa.

Interests

• fiction, poetry, yoga, German

• Music & Bands

  medieval and renaissance music

Connections

On June 27, 1982, Adrian married Jeffrey Ernest Evans, but they divorced in 1987. She has no children.

Father:

Daniel Robert Piper

Mother:

Olive Xavier (Smith) Piper

Spouse:

Jeffrey Ernest Evans

Friend:

Sol LeWitt

September 9, 1928 – April 8, 2007

Solomon "Sol" LeWitt was an American artist linked to various movements, including Conceptual art and Minimalism.

References

• Minimal Politics: Performativity and Minimalism in Recent American Art This book traces the evolution of the style and thinking of Hans Haacke, Mary Kelly, Robert Morris, Adrian Piper and Yvonne Rainer-five artists who explore the complex relationship between form, theatricality and ideology.
  1997
• Seeing Ourselves: Women's Self-Portraits The first chronicle of the whole story of female self-portraiture through the centuries - a key work in the study of women’s art.
  1998
• Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics
  1995
• Breakthroughs Avant-Garde Artists in Europe and America This book is a survey of Avant-Garde artists in Europe and America from the 1950's to 1990.
  1991
• Body Art/Performing the Subject
  1998
• Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art This book will prove as valuable to art and cultural historians and critics as it will be to public policy makers, students and a diverse public audience.
  1994