{"data":{"id":"4062","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":4062,"topgoose_id":1097,"tms_id":4062,"display_name":"Adrian Piper","sort_name":"Piper Adrian","display_date":"1948–","begin_date":"1948","end_date":"0","biography":"\u003cp\u003eSince the late 1960s Adrian Piper has worked across a range of mediums, including photography, performance, video installation, and text-based projects, to confront thorny social and political issues in American culture such as race and gender. Drawing on her training in philosophy, Piper engages reasoned argument and her own biography to induce audiences to consider their unexamined prejudices and questions of personal identity.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"/collection/works/11749\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eFood for the Spirit\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e, a performative\nproject she conceived in summer 1971,\narose as she was obsessively reading\nImmanuel Kant’s\u003cem\u003e\u0026nbsp;Critique of Pure Reason\u003c/em\u003e (1781) while secluded in her New York loft and following a severely restricted diet. She became so engrossed in her study that she began, as she recounted, to “go to my mirror to peer at myself to make sure I was still there.” To counter the feeling that she was disappearing she photographed the reflection of her body, often fully nude, while recording herself reciting the passages from Kant’s\u003cem\u003e\u0026nbsp;Critique\u003c/em\u003e that were “driving [her] to self transcendence.” Piper has explained that the ritualistic project helped her “to anchor [herself] in the physical world.” Although the taped recitations were inadvertently erased in the mid-1970s, Piper printed and publicly exhibited the fourteen apparitional, black-and-white self-portraits in 1997 as an extension of her conceptual project.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePiper maintains that even when her works contain a confrontational message, the process of establishing trust with her audience “requires a kind of self disclosure.” Her installation \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/8862\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eOut of\nthe Corner\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e features a barricade-like configuration of sixteen video monitors arranged on hollow pedestals in which overturned chairs have been placed, their metal legs pointing at the viewer. This phalanx of monitors seems to guard a single monitor that is positioned behind an upended table in the corner of the room and flanked by sixty-four black-and-white images of various black women, rephotographed from \u003cem\u003eEbony\u0026nbsp;\u003c/em\u003emagazine, on the adjacent walls. On the\ncorner monitor Piper delivers a text on\nmiscegenation, explaining that members\nof her audience who identify as white\nmay very well have black ancestors. During\nher monologue, each of the sixteen\nother monitors—at random and sequential\nintervals—presents the image of an\napparently white man or woman. With the\nSister Sledge song “We Are Family”\nproviding a musical backdrop, each of\nthe talking heads recites the same\nutterance in turn: “Some of my female\nancestors were so-called house niggers\nwho were raped by their white slave\nmasters. If you are an American, some of\nyours probably were, too.” The phrase\nis subtitled beneath the speakers’ faces\nin a variety of foreign languages. This\nhaunting array of skin tones, genders, and\nlanguages combines to underscore the\nsocially constructed aspects of race and\npromote a social consciousness of identity.\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":false,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500024467","wikidata_id":"Q373948","created_at":"2017-08-30T16:05:13.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-03-28T07:00:08.122-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/4062/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/4062/exhibitions"}}}}