Piper, Adrian

Adrian Piper is a conceptual artist and Kantian philosopher who creates work that explores the complexities of identity and selfhood as they relate to race, gender, social contract, and performativity. Her extensive practice ranges from performance art and installations to paintings and photographs. She often compounds images with text, drawing attention to the role of language in constructing oppressive or harmful socio-political ideologies.

In the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s permanent collection, My Calling (Card) #1 and My Calling (Card) #2, work as confrontational business cards that interrogate the racial and gender biases of the receiver. My Calling (Card) #1 addresses someone who has said something racist in the presence of a Black person. My Calling (Card) #2 asserts to its (likely male) receiver that the woman handing them the card wants to be left alone. From 1986-1990, as part of an ongoing performance piece, Piper handed these cards out whenever she was stuck in a correlating situation.

Adrian Piper received her Associate of Arts (1969) in visual arts from the School of Visual Arts, BA in philosophy from City College of New York (1974), and her MPhil and PhD from Harvard University (1977, 1981). During art school, she worked at the Seth Siegelaub Gallery where she was influenced by the works of Sol LeWitt and Yvonne Rainer. Her work was first exhibited in 1970 in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Information. In the 1970s, she began a series of street performances called Catalysis, where she observed the audience's reaction to her socially unacceptable actions such as walking the streets covered in paint, ketchup, and eggs. Her installation The Probable Trust Registry won the Golden Lion Award at the 2015 Venice Biennale, and she has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and the National Endowment for the Arts. A 50-year retrospective of Piper’s work was shown by the Museum of Modern Art in 2018. In addition to her prolific artistic output, Piper is an established philosopher, essayist, and lecturer. She became the first tenured Black American woman professor in the field of philosophy in 1987. Piper’s work is in the permanent collections of Art Institute of Chicago; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and various others.