Adrian Piper

(b. 1948)

Known for her performances confronting gender, race, and otherness, Adrian Piper is a pivotal figure in American Conceptual Art, an approach that foregrounded an artwork’s ideas over its physical execution. In her Mythic Being performances begun in 1973, for example, she assumed an alternate identity as a “third world, working class, overly hostile male,” in her words, implicating the public in their identity-based expectations and fantasies. Piper is also an accomplished analytic philosopher and was the first Black woman in the U.S. to achieve tenure in philosophy in 1987. As a self-identified refugee from American racism, Piper has been living in Berlin since 2005, a decision that followed her growing disillusionment with the post-9/11 political climate, a series of attacks on her home, and the termination of her professorship following her placement on the TSA Suspicious Traveler Watchlist.