Adrian Piper Overview

Adrian Piper is a Conceptual artist who uses language, rhetoric, and visual media to create pieces that render issues such as racism and xenophobia in harshly realistic terms. Also an accomplished professor of philosophy at Wellesley College, Piper sees racism as... [more]

Adrian Piper is a Conceptual artist who uses language, rhetoric, and visual media to create pieces that render issues such as racism and xenophobia in harshly realistic terms. Also an accomplished professor of philosophy at Wellesley College, Piper sees racism as "a visual and cognitive pathology that is deeply buried in the structure of the self." Her work presents themes and images from her life experiences, as well as from the mass media, in hopes of highlighting their inherently racist structures. Piper was one of the first American artists to tackle identity politics in such a direct manner, and was also a pioneer of the primarily textual art forms that emerged in the 1960s. She now uses photographs, texts, books, drawings, and video to convey her observations and experiences. Although she is pessimistic about whether racial relations will ever be fair and settled in her country, she sees her work as an attempt to at least expose, if not resolve, latent racism. [show less]