ADRIAN PIPER
Adrian Margaret Smith Piper is a first-generation Conceptual artist and analytic philosopher born in
1948 in NY. Like all Americans, she is ethnically mixed, and publicly identifies as an American woman
of acknowledged African ancestry. She rejects the adjectives “Black” and “White” as racist
stereotypes, and in 2012 she publicly announced her retirement from being “black”.
She grew up in a middle-class home in the Washington Heights section in Manhattan with her father,
a lawyer and her mother, an administrator at the City College of New York.
During her life she succeeded in two distinct fields: visual art and academic philosophy.
EDUCATION
She graduated from the New Lincoln School grammar school, while also attending the Art Students’
League. She then graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 1969. Piper received a Bachelor of Arts
in Philosophy in 1974. She attended Harvard University and she also studied Kant and Hegel at the
University of Heidelberg in 1977-1978, deepening her fascination and interests for philosophy. Piper
taught philosophy in different universities, becoming in 1987 the first tenured African American woman
professor in the field of philosophy at Georgetown University.
Between 2005-2007 she did a sojourn as a visiting lecturer at the Royal Danish Academy of Art in
Copenhagen. In that period Piper discovered that her name was on the Transportation Security
Administration's "Suspicious Traveller Watch List"
For this, she refused to return to the United States until her name was removed from the list. She
hasn't come back to the USA since 2007, and she is now living in Berlin. Regarding this situation she
said:”I owe everything I am to my birth, upbringing, and education in the United States. So I would
have preferred my achievements to be a source of pride to my country of origin. Unfortunately, it is not
set up to tolerate achievements like mine from someone like me, because people like me are not
supposed to exist."
In 2002, Piper founded the Adrian Piper Research Archive (APRA) as a resource for students,
scholars, curators, collectors, and writers.
ART
During her student’s year she became part of a group of artists. experimenting psychedelic
experiences with the drug LSD in the series LSD Paintings (1965-67). This series was discovered and
curated by Robert del Principe, and then exhibited for the first time in 2002 at Galeria Emi Fontana in
Milan, entering the international canon of psychedelic art.
LSD Self-Portrait from the Inside Out
In 1967 Piper became an assistant to the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt who inspired her to start
creating predominantly conceptual forms of art.
In the 1970s she introduced issues of xenophobia, race and gender in her works.
Throughout the Catalysis series of performance Piper questions the boundaries of socially acceptable
behaviour, and documents what happens when they are transgressed. In Catalysis II she walks
