Adrian Piper

In 1972 the artist Adrian Piper began periodically dressing as a persona called the Mythic Being, striding the streets of New York in a mustache, Afro wig, and mirrored sunglasses with a cigar in the corner of her mouth. Her Mythic Being performances critically engaged with popular representations of race, gender, sexuality, and class; they challenged viewers to accept personal responsibility for xenophobia and discrimination and the conditions that allowed them to persist. Piper’s work confronts viewers and forces them to reconsider assumptions about the social construction of identity. Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment is an in-depth analysis of this pioneering artist’s work, illustrated with more than ninety images, including twenty-one in color.Over the course of a decade, John P. Bowles and Piper conversed about her art and its meaning, reception, and relation to her scholarship on Kant’s philosophy. Drawing on those conversations, Bowles locates Piper’s work at the nexus of Conceptual and feminist art of the late 1960s and 1970s. Piper was the only African American woman associated with the Conceptual artists of the 1960s and one of only a few African Americans to participate in exhibitions of the nascent feminist art movement in the early 1970s. Bowles contends that Piper’s work is ultimately about our responsibility for the world in which we live.

“Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment is an important book. John P. Bowles has much to say not only about Piper’s own artistic journey but also about how scholars have chosen to read the avant-garde creative production of the 1960s and 1970s, and whether or not one can ever escape the ‘burden of the flesh’ when one creates or interprets works of art.”—Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, author of Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker, “John P. Bowles’s Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment is a groundbreaking, meticulously researched, and beautifully written text that challenges its readers to understand Adrian Piper’s early work in provocative new ways. Bowles forces us to re-evaluate our understanding of the histories of Conceptualism, Minimalism, feminism, and their intersections with the visual practices of African American artists.”—Steven Nelson, University of California, Los Angeles, “An amount of scholarship and personal acquaintance makes this book an informative read that leaves one wanting to know more about Piper’s exemplary approach to the question of what it might mean to make political art.”, “Bowles’s Adrian Piper: Race, Gender and Embodiment offers a detailed view of an artist dealing with the contingency of identity. . . . The inclusion of more than a decade of personal communication between Bowles and Piper make this a particularly fascinating study.”, “While there is much written about Piper, there are few volumes dedicated exclusively to such a complete investigation of her artistic career. It is a great addition to contemporary art scholarship, and is therefore recommended for any academic or research library that supports such pursuits.”

John P. Bowles is Associate Professor of African American Art at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His articles and art criticism have appeared in Signs, American Art, Art Journal, Art in America, and Art Papers, among other publications.