Adrian Piper

Adrian Piper is an American conceptual artist and philosopher from New York City. Her work addresses sociopolitical ideologies that institutionalize human thinking, being and interacting in the world, including the ideologies associated with human individuation of oneself from another. Piper earned an associate’s degree from the School of Visual Arts, New York, a BA in philosophy from City College, New York and an MPhil and PhD from Harvard University, Cambridge. Notable essays include “Ideology, Confrontation, and Political Self-Awareness,” published in High Performance magazine, which covers the philosophical matter that conceptually punctuates her artworks, and the two-volume essay “Rationality and the Structure of the Self,” published by Cambridge University Press in 2008. Piper’s career is marked by a number of significant achievements, including being the first African-American female philosophy professor to be granted academic tenure in the United States (1987), as well as being the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the Venice Biennale (2015), the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award (2014), the Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work from the College Art Association (2012), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1989), the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship (1979 and 1982) and the Professor Emeritus title awarded by the American Philosophical Association. In 2018, the New York Museum of Modern Art opened a 50-year retrospective of Piper's work, including drawings, paintings, photographs, multimedia installations, videos and performances. Piper has taught at Wellesley College, Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Michigan, Georgetown University and the University of California. Piper resides in Berlin, where she runs the Berlin Journal of Philosophy and the Adrian Piper Research Archive.