Adrian Piper

Adrian Piper (born 1948, New York, NY) is a pioneering conceptual artist and philosopher whose work has profoundly shaped contemporary art, critical theory, and discourses on race, identity, and the politics of representation. Beginning her career in the late 1960s, Piper emerged as one of the first women—and the first African American woman—associated with the early Conceptual Art movement.  Her practice spans performance, video, installation, drawing, painting, sound, and text-based works that confront viewers with their own assumptions about race, gender, perception, and power. Piper’s works such as the Mythic Being series, the Catalysis performances, and the Everything installations investigate systems of categorization and the social construction of identity.  A rigorous philosopher, Piper holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University and has published influential writings on Kant, metaethics, and aesthetics. In 2018, The Museum of Modern Art organized Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016, the largest exhibition ever devoted to a living artist in the museum’s history. Piper currently lives and works in Berlin, where she founded the Adrian Piper Research Archive (APRA).