In one of her early works, The Mythic Being, performed from 1972 to 1981, she was filmed walking the streets of New York and Cambridge, dressed as a light-skinned black man in sunglasses, a mustache, and an afro; she recited phrases from her personal journals and challenged other pedestrians to guess her gender, class, and ethnicity.
Piper’s artwork is collected in museums around the world, among them the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Generali Foundation in Vienna, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany.
Adrian Piper has won numerous awards and fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenh her personal journals and eim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. Piper has taught philosophy at Harvard; the University of Michigan; Stanford; the University of California, San Diego; and Georgetown University, where in 1987 she became the first female African American tenured professor in the field.
Her essays in art and art theory, collected in the two-volume Out of Order, Out of Sight: Selected Essays in Meta-Art and Art Criticism, have remained continuously in print since 1996.
“As an artist, philosopher, teacher, memoirist and engaged citizen, Piper embodies the power of broad and deep inquiry bound by a life of clear integrity,” said Matt Saunders, professor of art, film, and visual studies, in a news release. “Piper’s early conceptual and performance work cracked open the art world, making space for essential and uncomfortable conversations that resonate to this day.”