Adrian Piper

Adrian Margaret Smith Piper (born September 20, 1948) is an American conceptual artist and Kantian philosopher.

Her work addresses how and why those involved in more than one discipline may experience professional ostracism, otherness, racial passing, and racism by using various traditional and non-traditional media to provoke self-analysis.

She uses reflection on her own career as an example.

Piper has been awarded various fellowships and medals and has been described as having "profoundly influenced the language and form of Conceptual art".

Piper was born on September 20, 1948, in New York City.

She was raised in Manhattan in an upper-middle-class Black family and attended a private school with mostly wealthy, White students.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s Piper was influenced by Sol LeWitt and Yvonne Rainer.

Piper started studying and practicing yoga in 1965.

Through her education, she gained interest into the eastern yogic traditions of Hindu philosophy.

In June 1968 Piper's work was published in 0 to 9 magazine, an avant-garde publication that experimented with language and meaning-making.

She studied art at the School of Visual Arts and was graduated with an associate's degree in 1969.

She worked at the Seth Siegelaub Gallery, known for its conceptual art exhibitions, in 1969.

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.

In 1970, she exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition Information, and began to study philosophy in college.

Piper has said that she was kicked out of the art world during this time for her race and sex.

Her work started to address ostracism, otherness, and attitudes around racism.

In an interview with Maurice Berger, published under the title Critique of Pure Racism, Piper asserted that while she finds analysis of racism praiseworthy, she wants her artwork to help people confront their racist views.

During her philosophical studies, Piper focused on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason; this philosophical inspiration pervades her artworks, most specifically Food for the Spirit (1971).

Piper then studied philosophy at the City College of New York and graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor's in 1974.

Many of her works either allude to or directly incorporate eastern philosophy in them, for example, Mythic Being: Doing Yoga (1975), The Color Wheel Series (2000), and Mokshamudra Progression (2012).

On her website, Piper brings attention to the rise of yoga in the United States, and with it, the decline of its true spiritual meanings.

She states, "But my deeper hope is that professional philosophers who visit these pages will eventually take it upon themselves to begin the long, slow process of reintegrating the Eastern philosophical tradition with the Western one, of reminding us what we have lost – by restoring the application of theory to practice as a central measure of philosophical worth; by restoring, too, the more generous conception of the self extending beyond the ego that Western philosophy has forgotten; by restoring to a central place in our thinking the insights of Yoga into the structure of the ego and its relation to change, desire, and acquisitions; and thereby restoring the methods, practices and wisdom of Yoga to its rightful place among the many philosophical traditions that express our capacities for intellectual analysis and spiritual growth."

Piper received a master's in philosophy from Harvard University in 1977 and her doctorate in 1981, supervised by John Rawls.

She also studied at the University of Heidelberg.

Piper was awarded visual arts fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1979 and 1982, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989.

Piper taught at Wellesley College, Harvard University, Stanford University, University of Michigan, Georgetown University, and University of California, San Diego.

In 1981 Piper published an essay entitled "Ideology, Confrontation and Political Self-Awareness", in which she discusses concepts she explores through her art.

In her essay, she contemplates notions of human self-examination and belief structures that serve to "individuate oneself from another."

These beliefs begin with our early experiences in the world and go unquestioned until they are attacked by new experiences that break the conformity, introducing doubt—the key to self-examination and belief-revision.

Piper argues that the beliefs we tend to hold onto the longest, and often avoid exposing to examination, are those that allow us to maintain an understanding that makes sense to us about who we are and how we exist within the world at large.

She points out that these "ideologies" often are responsible for "stupid, insensitive, self-serving [behavior], usually at the expense of other individuals or groups."

Piper concludes the essay by telling readers that if considering the points she brings up makes them self-conscious about their political beliefs in the slightest degree, or causes them to have even "the slightest glimmerings of doubt about the veracity of [their] opinions, then [she] will consider [the] piece a roaring success."

Piper's work is largely based on her background in philosophy, including eastern philosophy.

In 1987, she became the first female African-American philosophy professor to receive academic tenure in the United States.

In 2002, she founded the Adrian Piper Research Archive (APRA) in Berlin, Germany, the focus of a foundation that was established in 2009.

While she was on unpaid leave in Berlin during 2008, Wellesley College terminated her tenured full professorship because of her refusal to return to the United States while listed as a "Suspicious Traveler" on the U.S. Transportation Security Administration Watch List.

Piper is divorced.

She currently lives and works in Berlin, where she runs the Adrian Piper Research Archive.

In 2015, she was awarded the Golden Lion for best artist in the international exhibition of the Venice Biennale.

In 2017, Piper received an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University.