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Adrian Piper (b. 1948) is an artist and philosopher whose conceptually rigorous and politically incisive practice investigates how identity, knowledge, and social perception are formed. Working across drawing, sculpture, photography, video, installation, writing, and performance, Piper is known for developing artistic strategies that challenge viewers to examine the assumptions, habits, and social structures through which they understand themselves and others. Her work has been especially influential for its sustained interrogation of race, gender, xenophobia, subjectivity, and the relationship between personal experience and wider political life.

Piper emerged in New York in the late 1960s as part of the first generation of Conceptual artists. After graduating from the School of Visual Arts in 1969, she developed early conceptual drawings and geometric works before turning increasingly to performance as a means of testing the social and psychological effects of art in everyday life. Alongside her artistic practice, Piper pursued advanced study in philosophy, earning a BA in Philosophy from the City College of New York in 1974 and a PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1981. In 1987, Piper became the first tenured African American woman professor in the field of philosophy in the United States. Piper’s work has been widely exhibited and collected internationally, and she has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the Golden Lion for best artist at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.

Piper continues to develop forms of artistic and philosophical inquiry that ask how individuals come to know themselves in relation to others, and how entrenched systems of perception can be brought into view, questioned, and transformed.