Mini Post

Beroso Awundaga

1/23/17

                                                Adrian Piper-

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. She became the first female African-American philosophy professor to receive academic tenure in the United States.

Medium: Pencil on paper

Conceptual artist Adrian Piper has studied art and taught philosophy at renowned institutions across the globe. Piper was a trailblazer in introducing the concepts of gender and race into a feminist art movement and has integrated drawing, street performances, and costumes into her art. Her 1981 drawing Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features has a permanent home in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.

This piece is apart of a side-by-side self portrait of Piper herself. It is a pencil drawing where she “emphasizes her broad nose, full lips, and luxuriant Afro hairdo (Giuliano). She has a very direct gaze in this drawing. It is almost as if the gaze is “emblematic of how her art confronts you” (Giuliano).

This is a very emotional piece. I can see how she was split between being a white girl with straight blond hair in the one drawing and then her true heritage of being black in the other self-portrait. This would be a difficult way to live life, it is almost as if she is living with a split personality. As I was researching this work, one of the pages said this was a mug-shot. I didn't think of it as one when I first seen it but then I realized that it looked a lot like a mug shot. Piper does a good job making this self-portrait portray her feelings. Almost all of her work is about sexual and racial tensions. This one does a good job on showing what it is like to be a black female during this time. The mug shot view is how a black person would feel when they walk into a room of people that they do not know.

The artists in this exhibition have defied the ‘shadow’ of marginalization and have challenged both the establishment and at times their own communities.” This also happens to address racism, due to blacks being constrained and the establishment going against their own favor.