Adrian Piper

Adrian Piper has consistently produced ground-breaking and transformative work that has profoundly shaped the form and content of conceptual art since the 1960s. Strongly inflected by her longstanding involvements with philosophy and yoga, her pioneering investigations into the political, social, psychological and spiritual potential of conceptual art have had an incalculable influence on artists working today. In conjunction with MoMA’s forthcoming Adrian Piper retrospective exhibition, and in collaboration with the artist, the Museum is publishing a ‘reader’ of new critical essays on her work. The publication will include six previously unpublished essays by established and emerging scholars. These narrowly focused essays will assess subjects of Piper’s work such as those that owe their framework to Kantian philosophy—which she holds a PhD from Harvard in; examine the turning point in her work from 1969–74 in subverting race and gender; and Piper’s intimate and authoritative artworks that examine xenophobia and racism.