Adrian Piper

Piper trained as a philosopher before she trained as an artist, and the two disciplines have remained inseparable. Born in New York in 1948^[1], she encountered Conceptualism as a young artist in the late 1960s, gravitating toward the dematerialised practices documented by Lucy Lippard. Her *Catalysis* series (1970–71) used her own body as an unannounced art object in public spaces: she attended a show at the Metropolitan Museum with bubble gum spread across her face, rode the subway concealing a tape recorder playing belches, and appeared at an art opening covered in feathers. The strategy refused the audience/performer separation that gallery performance typically maintained.

By the mid-1970s, race and identity had moved to the centre of her practice. The *Mythic Being* series (1974–76) generated a male alter ego through which Piper explored perception and misreading. *Cornered* (1988) placed a video monitor behind an overturned table: on screen, Piper addressed viewers about her experience as a light-skinned Black woman, offering a quiet but implacable refusal to be categorised by others' assumptions.

In 2018, MoMA devoted its entire sixth-floor special exhibition space to her retrospective, the first such treatment given to a single living artist in the museum's history. She subsequently moved to Berlin. Her philosophical work, *Rationality and the Structure of the Self* (2 vols., 2013), remains in print.