ABOUT ADRIAN

Adrian Margaret Smith Piper (b. 1948) is a first-generation Conceptual artist who began exhibiting her work internationally at the age of twenty and graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 1969. While continuing to produce and exhibit her artwork, she received a B.A. in Philosophy from the City College of New York in 1974 and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1981 under the supervision of John Rawls; and studied Kant and Hegel with Dieter Henrich at the University of Heidelberg in 1977-1978.

Adrian has taught Philosophy at Georgetown, Harvard, Michigan, Stanford, and UCSD. Following in the steps of trailblazing pioneer Dr. Joyce Mitchell Cook, in 1987 she became the first tenured African American woman professor in the field of philosophy. She has been a Non-Resident Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University since 1994 and was a Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in 1998-1999. She has received Guggenheim, AVA, NEA, NEH, Andrew Mellon, Woodrow Wilson, IFK and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin Research Fellowships, as well as the Skowhegan Medal for Sculptural Installation and the New York Dance & Performance Award (the Bessie) for Installation & New Media. Her principal philosophical publications are in metaethics, Kant, and the history of ethics. Her two-volume project in Kantian metaethics, Rationality and the Structure of the Self: The Humean Conception and Rationality and the Structure of the Self: A Kantian Conception integrates desire into reason and standard decision theory into classical predicate logic.

Adrian introduced issues of race and gender into the vocabulary of Conceptual art and explicit political content into Minimalism. In 2000 she further expanded the vocabulary of Conceptual art to include Hindu philosophical imagery and concepts. Her artwork is in many important collections. Her sixth traveling retrospective, Adrian Piper since 1965, closed at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona in 2004. Her two-volume collection, OUT OF ORDER, OUT OF SIGHT: Selected Writings in Meta-Art and Art Criticism 1967 – 1992 (MIT Press, 1996), is now available in paperback.

Adrian began her study and practice of yoga in 1965 with the Upanishads and Swami Vishnudevananda’s Complete Book of Yoga. She studied with Swami Satchidananda from 1966, became a svanistha in 1971 and a brahmacharin in 1985. Since then she has studied at Kripalu with Gitanand and with Arthur Kilmurray, Patricia Walden, Chuck Miller, Erich Schiffmann, Leslie Bogart, Richard Freeman, Tim Miller, David Swenson, Gary Kraftsow, Georg Feuerstein, David Frawley, and John Friend. She lives and works in Berlin.