ADRIAN PIPER
Born 1948 in New York City, USA. Lives and works in Hyannis, Massachusetts, USA.
 
© Thomas Erben Gallery, New York
Adrian Piper, “The Mythic Being: I Embody Everything You Most Hate and Fear,” 1975. © Thomas Erben Gallery, New York
 
Adrian Margaret Smith Piper is a conceptual artist whose work, in a variety of media, has focused on racism, racial stereotyping, and xenophobia for over three decades. Trained at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, she is the recipient of Guggenheim, AVA, and numerous NEA fellowships. She has received the Skowhegan Medal for Sculptural Installation and the Bessie Award for New Genres in Dance and Performance. She has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA); the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington DC, USA); the Whitney Museum (New York, USA); the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia); the Musee d'Art Moderne de Ville de Paris (France); the Fukyui Fine Arts Museum (Kyoto, Japan); the Museum of Contemporary Art at the Finnish National Gallery (Helsinki, Finland); Galleria Emi Fontana (Milan, Italy); Voges und Deisen (Frankfurt, Germany); and most recently the Paula Cooper and Thomas Erben Galleries in New York. Her works are in many important collections. Two retrospectives, Adrian Piper: A Retrospective 1965-1995 and MEDI(t)Ations: Adrian Piper's Video and Audio Works 1968-1992 toured the US from 1999 to 2001, and Prayer Wheel I.1 premiered at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, USA, in March 2001. Her traveling European retrospective, Adrian Piper since 1965, opened at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain, in October 2003. Piper received her BA in Philosophy from the City College of New York and did her MA and Ph.D. at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts , with John Rawls. She spent a year at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, studying Kant and Hegel with Dieter Heinrich. She taught at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of California at San Diego and Georgetown University. The recipient of NEH, Andrew Mellon and Woodrow Wilson Research Fellowships, her principal publications are in metaethics, Kant, and the history of ethics. She has recently finished her two-volume project in Kantian metaethics, Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume 1: The Humean Conception, and Volume II: A Kantian Conception. Two other book projects, Kant's Metaethics: First Critique Foundations and Recognition and Responsibility: Regarding the Other in Germany, Australia and the United States are nearing completion.
 
Contribution: Participates in Station 2: Aarhus Art Building, Aarhus, with: 1) “The Mythic Being: I Embody Everything You Most Hate and Fear,” 1975. Oil crayon on b/w photograph, 18 x 26 cm. Collection Thomas Erben Gallery, New York. 2) “Funk Lessons: A Collaborative Experiment in Cross-Cultural Transition,” 1983. DVD, 50 min. Courtesy Adrian Piper Research Archive, Hyannis, Massachusetts. 3) “My Calling (Cards) #1 & #2,” 1986-90. Printed cards, cardholders, stenciled sign, pedestal, each card 5.1 x 8.9 cm, sign 32.4 x 60.3 cm, pedestal 116.8 x 30.5 x 25.4 cm. Collection Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Massachusetts, The Dorothy Johnston Towne (Class of 1923) Fund. 4) “Cornered," 1988. Video installation with birth certificates, video, monitor, table, and chairs, dimensions variable. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago , Bernice and Kenneth Newberger Fund.