Abstract

Adrian Piper's artwork of the late 1960s and early 1970s manifests the dilemma that women and African-American artists faced at the time: how to make and exhibit art that would be accepted as having validity for all viewers and that would also allow the artist to reflect her own experiences as a black woman. Piper's approach---confronting viewers in order to force them to consider the social construction of identity---is singular among the work of her peers. I situate her work at the junction between the various artistic practices developed by black, white, and Feminist artists. Piper was the only black woman associated with Conceptualism and one of only a few to participate in exhibitions of the nascent Feminist art movement in the early 1970s. In order to reveal certain assumptions about whose art was considered Minimalist, Conceptualist, or Feminist---and whose could not be---it is important to consider how questions of race and gender manifest themselves in Piper's work and the critical response it generated. ;I consider how Piper's art addressed race and gender---or refused to address them---and the prejudiced responses this elicited. Piper's Hypothesis series documents activities conventionally deemed women's work as simple exercises in space and time, claiming universal value for personal experience. In her Catalysis street performances, Piper disfigured herself with such materials as smelly clothes or wet paint. She made herself up to appear as someone viewers feared, turning their scrutiny against them in order to explore the capacity for an anomalous human presence to provoke self-reflection. In Food for the Spirit, Piper presents her efforts to claim the transcendence promised by Kant's philosophy through the particular experience of her body. Like all of her work, this project exposes the unresolvable tension between embodied subjectivity and universalist ideals