Happy New Year POU! Let’s start 2018 by highlighting some great black philosophers and poets.
Adrian Margaret Smith Piper (born September 20, 1948) is an American conceptual artist and philosopher. Her work addresses ostracism, otherness, racial passing and racism. She attended the School of Visual Arts, City College of New York, and Harvard University, where she earned her doctorate in 1981. Piper received visual arts fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1979 and 1982, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989. In 1987, she became the first female African-American philosophy professor to receive academic tenure in the United States. In 2012, she received the Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work from the College Art Association. In 2015, she was awarded the Golden Lion for best artist of the 2015 Venice Biennale for her participation in Okwui Enwezor’s central show, “All the World’s Futures”.
Adrian Piper was born on September 20, 1948, in New York City. She was raised in Manhattan in an upper-middle-class black family, and attended a private school with mostly wealthy, white students. She studied art at the School of Visual Arts and graduated with an associate’s degree in 1969. Piper then studied philosophy at the City College of New York and graduated with a bachelor’s in 1974. Piper received her master’s from Harvard University in 1977 and her doctorate in 1981. She also studied at the University of Heidelberg.
Piper was influenced by Sol LeWitt and Yvonne Rainer in the late 60s and early 70s. She worked at the Seth Siegelaub Gallery, known for its conceptual art exhibitions, in 1969. In 1970, she exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art’s Information and began to study philosophy in college. Piper has said that she was kicked out of the art world during this time for her race and sex. Her work started to address ostracism, otherness, and attitudes around racism. In Berger’s Critique of Pure Racism interview, Piper asserted that while she finds analysis of racism praiseworthy, she wants her artwork to help people confront their racist views.
Piper was awarded visual arts fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1979 and 1982, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989. Piper taught at Wellesley College, Harvard University, Stanford University, University of Michigan, Georgetown University, and University of California, San Diego. She became the first female African-American philosophy professor to receive academic tenure in the United States in 1991. In 2008, for her refusal to return to the United States while listed as a “Suspicious Traveler” on the U.S. Transportation Security Administration Watch List, Wellesley College terminated her tenured full professorship while she was on unpaid leave in Berlin.
In 2011 the American Philosophical Association awarded her the title of Professor Emeritus. In 2013, the Women’s Caucus for Art announced that Piper will be a 2014 recipient of the organization’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Piper is divorced and has no children. She currently lives and works in Berlin, where she runs the Berlin Journal of Philosophy and the Adrian Piper Research Archive. In 2015, she was awarded the Golden Lion for best artist in the international exhibition of the Venice Biennale.
In 1981 Piper published an essay titled “Ideology, Confrontation and Political Self-Awareness” in which she discusses concepts she explores through her art. In her essay she contemplates notions of human self-examination and belief structures that serve to “individuate one self from another.” These beliefs begin with our early experiences in the world and go unquestioned until they are attacked by new experiences that break the conformity, introducing doubt—the key to self-examination and belief-revision.
Piper reveals how the beliefs that we tend to hold onto the longest and often avoid exposing to examination are those that allow us to maintain an understanding that makes sense to us about who we are and how we exist within the world at large. Its pointed out that these ideologies are often responsible for “stupid, insensitive, self-serving [behavior], usually at the expense of other individuals or groups.” Piper concludes the essay by telling the reader that if considering the points she brings up makes one self-conscious about their political beliefs in the slightest degree or starts to have even “the slightest glimmerings of doubt about the veracity of [their] opinions, then [she] will consider [the] piece a roaring success.”