September Issue 2001
Weatherspoon Art Gallery in Greensboro, NC, Features Retrospective by Adrian Piper
A retrospective of work by artist, philosopher and author Adrian Piper, whose ground-breaking work has explored attitudes about race and gender since the 1960s, opens Sept. 23, at the Weatherspoon Art Gallery on the campus of The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Greensboro, NC. The traveling exhibition has attracted media attention in major cities throughout the US and will make its only Southeast appearance at the Weatherspoon through Dec. 16, 2001.
Featuring more than 40 works, Adrian Piper: A Retrospective includes paintings, drawings, photographs, videos and installations created by this renowned artist between 1965 and 1995. Piper will visit UNCG to present a lecture exploring the use of language in her work at 7pm on Nov. 1. In addition, the Weatherspoon is sponsoring special educational events, including films and special tours.
Piper came to national attention in the 1960s and early 1970s as an artist at the forefront of performance and conceptual art movements. She is recognized also as a distinguished philosopher and writer, and one of three African-American women philosophy professors in the US. Her principal publications are in metaethics, Kant, and the history of ethics.
Throughout her career, Piper has used artistic media in radical and inventive ways to challenge and expand attitudes about race and gender. The perceptual experiences that make up any given work establish a direct, active relationship in which the artist asks viewers to look beyond confusion, ambivalence or discomfort. Filled with insight and profound understanding of the human condition, they act as a catalyst to help viewers find their way out of racist and Sexist attitudes.
"I actually want to change people," Piper said, in a 1990 interview with Afterimage journal. "I want my work to help people stop being racist whether they ask for it or not. Just as movies and encounter groups can change people, so maybe, can my art."
Exhibition highlights
The exhibition will showcase the wide range of mediums Piper has employed in her work, including autobiographical performances; didactic lectures and masquerade; photo-text; highly charged audio and video works presented in austere minimalist installations; drawings, manipulated photographs and her most recent work, which merges her earlier photo-conceptualist format with more personal statements about friendship, mortality and spirituality.
Piper's early work, influenced by the perceptual experiments of artists such as Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin and Yvonne Rainer, focuses more on ideas and concepts than the overt social content that would later become the hallmark of her work. In Sixteen Permutations on a Planar Analysis of a Square, (1968) Piper exhausted the possibilities of a finite system of geometric variations based on the square. In Meat into Meat (1968) she documented her boyfriend eating four hamburger patties she had cooked.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Piper was still in her 20s, social activism in this country was at a peak. The US bombing of Cambodia, the student killings at Jackson and Kent states, the emerging women's movement - all forced her to consider her art's relevance within the larger social reality, prompting her to move into performance-based investigations of societal attitudes toward race and gender. In the 1970 Catalysis series, she explored xenophobia and intolerance by transforming herself in odd or repulsive ways and then engaging in everyday social interaction. For instance, Piper would ride the subway or browse a bookstore in clothes saturated with vinegar, eggs and cod-liver oil while observing the reactions of those around her. For her performance series, The Mythic Being, (1972-75), which also includes drawings, collages and photographs, Piper took on the persona of a hip, streetwise African-American man by dressing in an Afro wig, black mustache, large sunglasses, and masculine shirt and pants and then confronting people on the street. Drawing on racialized fears, The Mythic Being was designed to "embody everything you most hate and fear," she said.
Since the late 1970s, Piper has created installations that incorporate video and sound, as well as multi-panel works pairing blown-up photographs from magazines and newspapers together with provocative texts. In these works, she urges museum-goers to consider their feelings and beliefs about other races or gender stereotyping, and to accept responsibility for their attitudes and actions. This is seen in her two "calling cards," which consist of neatly printed text on 2 x 3 1/2-inch cards. She would present these to people in social gatherings, when they made a hurtful remark about blacks. One of these, My Calling Card #1 (1986-90) reads, "Dear Friend, I am black," (a fact not obvious because of Piper's light skin and straight hair.) "I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark." The card continues for several lines, concluding with the words, "I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me." She would present her other calling card, voiced in a similar tone, to protect her solitude in public settings.
"Blacks like me are unwilling observers of the forms racism takes when racists believe there are no blacks present," Piper once wrote. "Sometimes what we observe hurts so much we want to disappear, disembody, disinherit ourselves from our blackness. Our experiences in this society manifest themselves in neurosis, demoralization, anger and in art."
Piper further expounds on the issues of stereotyping and racial identity in her Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features. And in her video installation, Cornered, she addresses white viewers head on, inviting them to come to terms with their own racially-mixed ancestry as she makes the point that most white Americans are probably part African as well.
Background on the artist
Born in 1948, Adrian Margaret Smith Piper grew up in Harlem and was educated in mostly white private schools in New York City. She studied art at the School of Visual Arts in New York City (1966 -1969), and received her BA in philosophy from the City College of New York, and her MA and PhD from Harvard University. Awarded the Harvard Sheldon Traveling Fellowship in 1977, Piper spent the academic year in Berlin and Heidelburg studying Kant and Hegel. She has held teaching positions at Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Michigan, the University of California at San Diego and Georgetown University. She is a recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities, Andrew Mellon and Woodrow Wilson Research fellowships. A non-resident fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, Piper was recently elected as a Distinguished Scholar at the Getty Research Institute for Art History and the Humanities.
Piper's two-volume collection, Out of Order, Out of Sight, an artistic autobiography and occasionally scathing commentary on mainstream art, art criticism and contemporary American culture is available in paperback, and two book projects, the two-volume Rationality and the Structure of the Self, and Kant's Metaethics, are nearing completion.
"Adrian Piper is one of the most provocative, insightful and articulate of contemporary American voices," said author and Princeton University Professor Joyce Carol Oates.
Curators
Maurice Berger, a Senior Fellow at the Vera List Center for Art & Politics of the New School for Social Research in New York City, organized the exhibition for the Fine Arts Gallery of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Berger is author of the catalog accompanying Adrian Piper: A Retrospective.
Ron Platt, curator of exhibitions for the Weatherspoon, is responsible for managing special and temporary exhibitions, including Adrian Piper: A Retrospective. He was formerly curator of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem. He has also served as assistant Curator at the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Catalog
The exhibition is accompanied by the illustrated 200-page catalog. Adrian Piper: A Retrospective. It includes essays by the artist, curator Maurice Berger, critics Laura Cottingham and Kobena Mercer, and the artist herself. Adrian Piper: A Retrospective was organized by the Fine Arts Gallery at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Support for the exhibition has been provided by the Peter Norton Family Foundation, Lannan Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Maryland State Arts Council.
Related Program Schedule
Throughout the exhibition, the Weatherspoon will present a number of special programs. The program highlight will be a guest lecture by Adrian Piper on Nov. 1 in the Weatherspoon auditorium. Other events include a three-part film series, noontime talks with UNCG faculty, and Wed. evening and Sun. public tours. An updated listing of exhibition programming is available on the Weatherspoon website at (http://www.weatherspoon.uncg.edu).
Public Opening Reception: Sept. 23, at 2pm.
Guest Lecture: By Adrian Piper entitled, Talking Pictures - Nov. 1, at 7pm. Piper's art work makes unusual demands on its audience. Quite aside from its provocative content, it frequently involves simultaneous expression or communication in a number of different languages: of words, of form, of music, of lyrics, of the body. It thus requires its audience either to compute on several channels at once, or to spend much more time on a particular work than the average seven seconds per painting or sculpture given by most art viewers. Piper's work is particularly demanding in its frequent use of extended written, spoken, or lyrical text. This lecture surveys and analyzes those works of the last few decades notable for their extended and various uses of language: as object, as tool, as weapon, as instrument of control; as scalpel, spotlight, vacuum cleaner, or ladder finally to be kicked away. Duration: approximately one hour.
Public Tours: Free, docent led tours of the Adrian Piper exhibition are available. Tours meet in the Atrium and promptly begin at scheduled times. Duration: approximately one hour. Oct. 3, at 7pm; Oct. 7, at 2pm; and Dec. 2, at 2pm.
Film Series: Films will be shown on selected
Wednesdays with a repeat showing on the following Sunday. Films
are not rated; subject matter may not be suitable for all audiences.
Program 1 - Invisible Revolution - Oct. 17, at 7pm & Oct.
21, at 2pm. A startling documentary by Beverly Peterson about
the culture of hate among racist and anti-racist youth groups
in America's universities and
suburbs. (2000, 56 minutes. Contains adult content.) Program 2
- Youth Documentaries (3 short films) - Nov. 14, at 7pm &
Nov. 18, at 2pm. Video shorts created by youth about race and
identity include: All I See Is What I Know (Zachariah Webb, 2000
Best Young Filmmaker, Nashville Independent Film Festival); Living
in Two Worlds (by the Al Noor School, Brooklyn, New York); and
more. Program 3 - Family Name - Dec. 5, at 7pm & Dec. 9, at
2pm. As a child growing up in Durham, NC, Macky Alston never questioned
why all the other Alstons in his elementary school were black.
Twenty-five years later, he travels to family reunions, churches,
and original Alston plantations asking questions and uncovering
stories. (89 minutes. 1997 Sundance Film Festival Freedom of Expression
Award.)
Admission to all special events and programs is free.
About the Weatherspoon
The Weatherspoon Art Gallery is a university art museum that serves UNCG, community, state and national audiences by collecting, preserving, presenting and interpreting the work of nationally recognized American artists from the turn of the 20th century onward. Recent exhibitions, such as The Prints of Andy Warhol, Robert Creeley's Collaborations and Looking Forward Looking Black, have drawn record audiences and critical acclaim. The permanent collection of more than 5,000 objects is one of the finest in the southeast. Willem de Kooning, Louise Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg, Alexander Calder, Andy Warhol, Robert Colescott, Cindy Sherman and Magdalena Abakanowicz are just a few of the recognized artists represented. Other highlights include the Dillard Collection of Art on Paper, the Cone Collection of Matisse prints and bronzes and the Lenoir C. Wright Collection of Japanese woodblock prints. The Weatherspoon's collection is increasingly recognized throughout the art world, as evidenced by requests for loans by such major institutions as the Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Seattle Art Museum and the Wadsworth Atheneum. Noted art collectors such as Eileen and Peter Norton, Hudson, Anthony Podesta and others have also acknowledged the museum's distinguished reputation with recent gifts to its collection.
For more information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the gallery at 336/334-5770, or check the web at (http://weatherspoon.uncg.edu).
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