LEVEL 3, GALLERY 28
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, BORN 1948
LIVES AND WORKS IN BERLIN
PROJECT
Adrian Piper’s participatory work, The Humming Room 2012, is made up of an empty room guarded by a security officer and a joyous but perplexing instruction for creative interaction: ‘IN ORDER TO ENTER THE ROOM, YOU MUST HUM A TUNE. ANY TUNE WILL DO.’ Visitors are faced with the security guard enforcing Piper’s directions, through which she playfully explores the notion of authority and simultaneously offers participants complete freedom of expression within these parameters.
ABOUT
Adrian Piper is a first-generation conceptual artist who started exhibiting her work internationally at the age of twenty. She graduated from the School of Visual Arts, received a B.A. in Philosophy from CCNY in 1974, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard in 1981. She studied Kant and Hegel with Dieter Henrich at the University of Heidelberg in 1977–1978 and taught philosophy fulltime for 30 years. Piper was the first tenured African American woman professor in the field of philosophy. She introduced issues of race and gender into the vocabulary of conceptual art and explicit political content into minimalism. In 2000 Piper further expanded the vocabulary of conceptual art to include Vedic philosophical imagery and concepts. She is the recipient of many fellowships and awards in art and philosophy. Piper’s seventh travelling retrospective opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2018. She won the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 56th Venice Biennale. Piper has studied and practiced yoga since 1965, and lives and works in Berlin, where she runs the APRA Foundation Berlin.