Adrian Piper

Unlike any other artist of her generation, Adrian Piper (American, born 1948) has consistently produced groundbreaking and transformative work that has profoundly shaped the form and content of uncompromising 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. Published in conjunction with the most comprehensive exhibition of her work to date, this catalogue presents over 200 works of art that encompass the full range of diverse media in which Piper has contributed: works on paper, video, multimedia installation, performance, painting, sound and photo/text-based graphics. Essays by curators and scholars examine specific segments of Piper’s practice over five decades of her career, including the influence of LSD on her life and early work from 1965 to 1980; the introduction of the Mythic Being – her subversive masculine alter-ego – and the inception of works that probe the viewer’s innate stereotypes of racism and gender; her media and installation works post 1980 that challenge xenophobic stereotypes and gender inequality; and global conditions that overlay with Piper’s art, framing the divisions between peoples of colour on an international scale. Featuring previously unpublished texts by the artist and extensive back matter, the publication expands our understanding of the conceptual and post-conceptual art movements and Piper’s pivotal position both among her peers and later generations of artists.