Adrian Piper
American Performance Artist, Installation Artist, and Photographer
New York City, New York
Summary of Adrian Piper
Who are you? How do others see you and how do you define your own identity? These are the key questions at the heart of Adrian Piper's practice. Rising to prominence as a pioneering Conceptual, Minimalist and Feminist artist in the New York art scene during the early 1970s, Piper's work raises often uncomfortable questions about racial politics and identity, engages in social critique, and deploys concepts from her parallel career as a philosopher.
Her work is often provocative, and asks her audience to confront truths about themselves and the society they live in. This practice has included performances and street interventions, paintings and sculpture, and events and objects less easily defined by conventional art historical terms. She works across disciplines, forms and conceptual frameworks, positioning her practice as a single endeavour of multiple parts.
Accomplishments
- Piper's political convictions and strategies are often communicated through an engagement with autobiography and/or everyday life, a strategy which speaks to her interest in philosophical notions of the self. Her experiences with LSD as a young artist, instances of everyday racism and institutional marginalisation, and personal tragedy have all formed the basis of a different suite of works or series of performances.
- Her work most often asks questions about identity and self, perhaps most notably around the question of race. By drawing on her experience as a person of mixed racial heritage her work interrogates the assumptions made about identity as it relates to skin color, revealing the underlying racism and hypocrisy of Western society, particularly in the United States.
- As a female artist and scholar, Piper's work often also interrogates her experiences of sexism and misogyny. This provided an inspiration for a slightly later generation of independent and multi-disciplinary female artists (including Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman), a legacy that has only recently come to be acknowledged as significant in the development of this kind of work.
- Piper's work and personal life are blurred, and she maintains a commitment to the significance of symbolic action in her interactions with artistic and educational institutions, authority figures and governments. Perhaps most indicative of this conviction is her insistence that she would not return to the United States after some time abroad until her name had been removed from the "watch list" of potentially subversive passengers.
- Piper is committed to working across multiple disciplines and areas of scholarship. She maintains her artistic practice alongside a career as an academic within the subject area of philosophy, and sees the two roles as informing each other. Her foundation (The Adrian Piper Research Archive) works to support other interdisciplinary scholars who might similarly struggle to balance two concurrent and interrelated careers.
Progression of Art
LSD Self-Portrait from the Inside Out
Angry and jagged forms in acrid yellow, outlined with black and red, expand outwards from a central female figure, forming a tight web that seems to mutate across the surface of the painting. The nude figure in the centre of the canvas is Adrian Piper herself, seen in the reflection of a mirror. Her pose resembles that of a classical female nude, yet this similarity is partially undone by her reduction to a stark black and yellow silhouette.
In around 1965, just as she was beginning her fine art degree at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Piper experimented with the still-legal drug LSD, which she took about six times over 6 months as part of a personal mission to go "beyond the surface of things". Her strange, hallucinogenic experiences were recorded in the painting series LSD Paintings, made between 1965 and 1967, which document the experience of the drug through forms reminiscent of the then fashionable Op Art, with geometric shapes which seem to swell in and out of the painting in an approximation of the merging of real and imaginary during a trip. Piper made these paintings as an attempt to capture the experience of psychedelic drugs in order to retain and communicate the potential of LSD to teach people about themselves. Piper wrote about observing herself and her experiences "from the inside out", and here brings together both her inner experiences with the drug and the viewpoint of an outsider looking on as she disappears into a trance-like state.
These early paintings are often viewed as separate from her later, more Conceptual works of art, yet as writer Craig Hubert points out in the Observer, "...there can be found in these early drawings and paintings the emergence of a lifelong preoccupation with the mutability of identity, a self-exploration that looks both inward and outward, which is a hallmark of the psychedelic experience." This dual approach, where Piper sees herself both through her own eyes and those of an outside observer, would become a central focus as her practice developed, which as Hubert points out, "allows both a sense of removal and a deeper embrace". The loss of subjectivity through psychoactive drugs also has a long history in Piper's parallel career of philosophy, with the notion of being "outside yourself" brought about by LSD in particular raising interesting philosophical questions about the constitution of self through conscious perception.
Acrylic on Canvas
Catalysis III
In this photograph a young Adrian Piper walks through the streets of New York City wearing a sign emblazoned with the warning "WET PAINT." The work is one of a series of performances made between 1970-3 under the series title Catalysis. In this suite of works the artist takes a series of direct actions aimed at challenging and antagonising her relationships with her audience; here she wore clothing coated in sticky white emulsion paint and took on ordinary activities including a shopping trip to Macy's Department Store.
Piper entices viewers to come in and touch her to find out whether or not the paint is really wet, provoking varied reactions once they realise that it is. The interaction represents a break with the normal parameters of social conduct, introducing an element of danger and the unknown to everyday life. As with many other examples of performance art, the reaction and response from the audience (whether traditionally constituted through attendance at an event or by simply being on the street at the same time Piper walks through) is as much part of the performance as the action itself.
Throughout the Catalysis series Piper questions the boundaries of socially acceptable behaviour, and documents what happens when they are transgressed. Other public actions included walking the streets and travelling on the train in peak hour in clothes that had been soaked in eggs, milk, vinegar and cod for a week, testing the public's reaction to someone 'unwashed', and travelling around the city 'silenced' with a towel stuffed in her mouth. The title of the series of works makes reference to a chemical reaction triggered by a catalyst, with Piper's actions becoming the trigger to spark a reaction between herself and her audience. Throughout the 1960s and 70s Piper established a reputation for causing deliberate provocation amongst her viewers, actions that influenced a generation of artists that followed including the Young British Artists movement and later performance artists such as William Pope L.
Silver Print, Performance
The Mythic Being: I Embody Everything You Most Hate and Fear
In this monochrome, drawn-on photograph, a shadowy figure emerges from the darkness wearing dark sunglasses and smoking a cigarette, captioned in the top corner with the phrase, "I embody everything you most hate and fear." The figure in the image is Piper, in drag as her male alter ego 'Mythic Being', whose identity she assumes through wearing a fake moustache, afro wig and sunglasses.
Piper created the character of "Mythic Being" over a period of two years between 1973 and 1975. Disguising herself as a light-skinned and working class black man, Piper wandered around the streets of New York reciting various mantras that were lifted from her teenage diary, including the caption seen here, and various other angst-ridden phrases including, "surrounded and constrained", and "God please give me the strength to withdraw - I can't be hurt anymore - I've been hurt too much. Please help me preserve myself". Her performances were documented through photographs, drawings and videos, including this work. Many of the different forms of documentation and accompanying information (such as museum wall labels) also tracked public reactions to her character and his behaviour.
Piper's black male character deliberately embodied a marginalised, outsider position, which drew attention to the difficulties faced by people who share those aspects of identity in their everyday life. Yet Piper also found in the role a certain emancipation, as writer John P. Bowles explains: "Suspended between difference and identification, the Mythic Being becomes, in Piper's account, a paradoxical figure of liberation. Dressed as a man of uncertain race, the artist could act in ways that, as a black woman, she was expected not to". Piper elaborated on this in a description of her behaviour, writing, "I swagger, stride, lope, lower my eyebrows, raise my shoulders, sit with my legs wide apart on the subway..." In breaking out of her usual persona Piper highlights the restrictive ways women, and particularly African American women, were expected to behave. The tension that comes from Piper's assumption of this role, plays against both her gender and the way she was usually perceived by people of different ethnicities in her day-to-day life. This pioneering break with prescribed gender and racial norms and assertion of her own right to define how she is perceived influenced a raft of later artists, including Cindy Sherman's theatrical photographs, Sarah Lucas' "ladette" posturing and Glenn Ligon's powerful text art.
Oil Crayon on Gelatin Silver Print
Self Portrait Exaggerating my Negroid Features
A carefully drawn female figure stares out from this pencil drawing with a confrontational expression, challenging the viewer to address her directly. This dramatic, head-on portrait resembles the sombre tone and theatrical composition of German Renaissance painter Albrecht Durer's famous Self Portrait at 28 (1500). In both images the figure is curtained by a triangular frame of long hair, although Piper's self-portrait is one in which, as she says, she exaggerates her "Negroid features."
As an artist of mixed-race origin Piper has addressed issues of racism and prejudice from the position of both "black" and "white" racial identities, describing herself as a black woman who could pass for white, a situation which has often placed her in complicated social scenarios. In this self-portrait Piper illustrates the way she views herself, as an African American woman, which may stand in distinction from the common ways she is perceived by others in public. This self-portrait accentuates the physical characteristics that indicate "blackness" that are not usually read in relation to the artist. The ability to pass as white is one which has a complicated racial history, and Piper here deliberately invokes the debates around racial physiology and biological determinism that have been the basis of racist policies and attitudes throughout history.
As with many of her previous artworks, Piper sets up a distinction here between inner and outer worlds, drawing attention to the psychological conflicts between the way we wish to be seen and the way we are seen by others. The deliberately provocative stare within the self-portrait reflects the confrontational nature of much of Piper's art, which challenges us to re-examine and address deeply ingrained and systematically naturalised beliefs about race, nationality, and belonging. Later in the 1980s Piper produced a series of small calling cards (My Calling Card, 1989-90) with a statement beginning with, "Dear Friend, I am black. I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark..." a statement that both clarified her desire to identify as a black and confronted the prevalent racism she observed and experienced on a regular basis.
Pencil on Paper
Funk Lessons
This image is a still taken from one of Piper's staged performances, Funk Lessons, a series of participatory social events where Piper taught white audience members about the history of the predominantly black musical genre funk, and gave instructions on how to dance to it. Reflecting on the history of funk music in a series of essays titled 'Notes on Funk', Piper wrote, "Funk constitutes a language of interpersonal communication and collective self-expression that has its origins in African tribal music and dance and is the result of the increasing interest of contemporary black musicians and the populace in those sources elicited by the civil rights movements of the 1960s and early 1970s."
The work draws a distinction between black and white cultural forms of expression through dance, where Piper sees social dance in white culture as "viewed in terms of achievement, social grace or competence", in contrast with black culture, with its history of a "collective and participatory means of self-transcendence and social union ... (which is) much more fully integrated into daily life."
Piper drew on funk's democratic, social potential with these performances, inviting audiences to take up an active role in the making of the artwork. This was enabling them to, as she writes, "get down and party together." This integrative, immersive approach to making art was aimed at breaking down racial prejudices by encouraging a positive and celebratory attitude towards black culture and the important contributions it has (and continues to) make towards the construction of modern American culture and, by extension, society. Such group-led activities were pioneering and paved the way for other artistic movements in the following decades, with connections to be drawn between Piper's work and the socially driven Relational Aesthetics artistic practices, for example. This work is also an example of Piper's commitment to accessible forms of creating and enjoying art, seen here through the relatively informal space of the workshop, but also through her earlier street interventions.
Still from a color video, 15 minutes 17 seconds
Safe #1
Piper made these photographs in 1990 as part of a multimedia installation aimed at addressing deeply-rooted racial issues in America. A series of images featuring smiling African and African-American families, including the ones seen here, were taken from magazines and overlaid with positive phrases in red text, such as "We are among you", and "We are around you". But to accompany the photographs in the gallery space, Piper recorded her own voice reciting various possible negative reactions to the imagery, which included statements like, "I'm sorry, I just don't feel comfortable with this. I mean, of course, I appreciate the artist's good intentions. I really do. But I am just having a lot of trouble with this piece."
In juxtaposing conflicting reactions to such positive images Piper encourages viewers to reconsider deeply ingrained attitudes that create a barrier against social inclusion and acceptance. The work deliberately challenges viewers to face their own uncomfortable attitudes that may not usually be aired in public in such a stark fashion. Through the tension between the voiceover and the images, the hypocrisy at the heart of race relations in America is evoked. But rather than simply making gallery visitors feel uneasy, Piper's intent was to encourage greater acceptance of one another by inviting viewers to see that underneath surface appearances there are shared objectives of stable family relationships, community and belonging that is being celebrated in these (slightly corny) images. Museum of Modern Art curator Christophe Cherix sums it up when he writes, "Safe is a transformative experience. You'll leave it a different person that you entered it."
Photograph - Collection Adrian Piper Research Archive. Foundation Berlin. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin
Everything #2.8
This images shows a middle-aged couple whose faces have been erased, giving the image a macabre, ghostly edge and obscuring their true identities. Printed over their faces is the text "Everything will be taken away", a phrase inspired by Alexander Solzhenitsyn's famous quote, "Once you have taken everything away from a man, he is no longer in your power. He is free."
Piper made this work as part of a larger series titled Everything, begun in 2003, and picked up again in 2007 once she had established a new life in Berlin. The series explores powerful themes of loss, disorientation and reinvention. The series began with a street performance, which tested audience reactions to the statement inspired by Solzhenitsyn, later leading on to installation and image-based works. Throughout the series Piper's ambiguous phrase appeared on a range of personal and public imagery, including photographs of political leaders and the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, inviting its viewers to consider their interpretation of the phrase in relation to a varied range of contexts.
In this series of works, along with much of her practice, Piper neatly collapses together personal and private worlds. On one level of meaning she conveys and comments on the loss and sense of exile she has experienced in her life as a mixed-race American, while she also invites viewers to consider loss in a wider, political sense by suggesting some of the fear and instability surrounding refugees, immigrants and non-white Americans. Yet by referencing Solzhenitsyn (who was himself a political prisoner in the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1956), there is also a sense of hope and artistic endeavour beneath loss, suggesting the possibility of moving beyond the past and beginning again.
Photocopied photograph on graph paper, sanded with sandpaper, overprinted with inkjet ink - Private Collection
What Will Become of Me
This image shows a row of jars lined up neatly on a shelf. A series of taller containers contain murky, ambiguous dark matter while two smaller ones on the right of the frame hold a lighter substance. These jars are flanked by two frames of written text. The serial nature of their arrangement and suggestion of labelling gives a clinical, scientific quality to the display which perhaps conflicts with the intimate content within the jars. The tall containers hold cuttings of Piper's hair, collected over the past few decades as it gradually fades to grey, whilst the smaller ones archive the artist's nail and skin clippings.
The written document to the left of the shelf is a written account of Piper's personal circumstances in the year 1985 that led her to begin the work, a series of events that included the breakdown of her marriage, the death of her father, and the loss of her job. On the right is a "Statement of Intent" written in 1989, outlining Piper's intention to donate the archival artwork to New York's Museum of Modern Art after her death. Various documents of the installation over the years reveal the minute patterns of change it has undergone as the artist's hair has gradually shifted from black to grey, and the quantities of matter accumulated has slowly increased. In this work Piper deliberately sets up several conflicts between private and public by displaying intimate bodily material in an almost clinical manner, contrasted against intensely personal details from her private life rendered in a detached, remote manner.
Writer Deirdre Smith suggests that in this work Piper is searching for some sense of historical permanence, collecting these traces as a way of asserting "I am alive" amidst a period of significant personal loss by "literally inserting herself into [MoMA's] collection." Beneath the surface, Piper echoes to the viewer the inevitable and unknown processes of gradual loss that come with living life. As Smith writes, "...as certain as the document looks and feels it does not seek to answer the unknowable questions that accompany life and death."
Framed Text, Glass Jars, Shelf, Hair, Fingernails and Skin - The Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Biography of Adrian Piper
Childhood
Adrian Piper was born in New York City in 1948 and grew up in a middle-class home in Washington Heights, near the Harlem area of Manhattan. Her father, Daniel Robert Piper, was a lawyer and her mother an administrator in the English Department of the Open Admissions Program at the City College of New York. Piper describes her racial background as 'mixed, like all Americans'. She talks of her father as having a mixed heritage derived from white and light-skinned black property owners, and of her mother as descending from planter-class Jamaican immigrants. This created a complex genealogy she describes as, "1/32 Malagasy (Madagascar), 1/32 African of unknown origin, 1/16 Igbo (Nigeria), and 1/8 East Indian (Chittagong, India [now Bangladesh]), in addition to having predominantly British and German family ancestry". Piper remembers her upbringing as warm and nurturing, writing, "(I) grew up physically inviolate, unable even to imagine the possibility of a breach to my physical integrity." As an adult, Piper credited her unflinching self-confidence in the face of racist and sexist marginalization to this solid grounding, firmly stating: "I do not need your help. I was loved."
In Harlem as a young adult Piper was often taunted by black neighbours for her supposedly white appearance and forced to prove her black identity through a "Suffering Test" by telling them her "recent experiences of racism". This was an experience she says made her feel, "... both unjustly accused or harassed, and also remorseful and ashamed at having been the sort of person who could have provoked the accusation."
After attending Riverside Church nursery and kindergarten, Piper moved on to the progressive, New Lincoln School Grammar School and High School, attending classes at the Art Students League. As a teenager she was well read, studying both philosophy and contemporary fiction and developing interests in avant-garde music and film. Her intricate family history and experiences growing up led Piper to focus in part on the absurdities of racial categorisations in American society throughout her later career as an artist.
Early Training and Work
Piper studied sculpture and painting at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, graduating with an associate degree in fine art in 1969. The artist's early student years were formative as a time when she became part of a circle of artists, musicians and writers in downtown Manhattan who shared a desire to "go beyond the surface of things." Piper experimented widely with this group of friends, capturing her psychedelic experiences with the (still-legal) drug LSD in the series LSD Paintings (1965-67). This series afforded her some early gallery shows and success within the art world. In 1965 she remembers that she discovered the transformative potential of yoga, which would become a lifelong practice.
In 1967 Piper became an assistant to the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt after being inspired by his declaration, "the idea becomes the machine to make art". Provoked by this statement, and her time working with LeWitt, Piper felt a desire to create predominantly conceptual forms of art. Between 1967 and 1970 the work she made took the form of maps, diagrams, photographs and descriptive language, drawing on the meditative language of yoga to explore the "indexical present" of human perception and consciousness.
Continuing to work as an artist, Piper embarked on a parallel career as an academic in the following years. She first earned a BA with Research Honors in Philosophy and a minor in Medieval and Renaissance Musicology from the City College of New York in 1974, before moving on to an MA and PhD in Philosophy in 1981, as well as studying Kant and Hegel with Dieter Henrich at the University of Heidelberg in 1977 and 1978. As a student Piper was bright, confident and, by her own admission, a "misguided troublemaker", prone to questioning perceived authority. She remembers that she "behaved uncontrollably [...] raising my hand every five minutes in every class meeting to innocently request clarification [...] dumfounding my instructors."
Throughout the 1970s Piper first began to explore the ideas that would come to define her oeuvre, delving into the frequently controversial and polarizing topics of xenophobia, race, and gender. She often did this through autobiographical content or self-portraiture. In the interactive sound work Stand In #1 (1974), Piper recorded an intimate dialogue with her boyfriend, Rob Rubinowitz, and played it in the gallery, while in the performance series Catalysis (1970-72) Piper provoked members of the public by challenging socially acceptable behavioural norms through activities that included travelling with a towel stuffed in her mouth, or walking through the streets covered in wet paint. Piper took these ideas a stage further with a two-year investigation into female drag, dressing as a male alter-ego referred to as "Mythic Being". To do this she donned a fake moustache and afro wig in order to embody, as she put it "everything you [society] most despise and fear."
Mature Period
In the 1980s Piper continued to pursue both the academic and artistic strand of her career, taking on philosophy teaching posts in Michigan, Stanford, California, and Georgetown. In 1982 Piper married clinical psychologist Jeffrey Ernest Evans, but within three years cracks were beginning to appear in their marriage. In her own words, 1985 was a "bad year", as Piper struggled to secure a teaching post, her father died of cancer, her mother struggled to cope with the loss, and her marriage fell apart. It was in this same year that Piper began the ongoing work of art titled, What Will Become of Me, a collection of honey jars filled with her hair and nails that she continues to update. The work is a pensive consideration of her own mortality, and will only be complete once she is cremated and her ashes have been added to the collection.
At Wellesley College in Massachusetts in 1990 Piper became the first African-American woman to be appointed a professor of philosophy in the United States, remaining in that post for the next 15 years. During her time there she specialized in the work of influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant, as well as in the teaching of Eastern philosophical theories. Her parallel artistic practice continued to explore the socio-political sphere of racial prejudice, challenging various preconceived stereotypes through the representation of her own body and those of others. This can be seen in works such as Self Portrait Exaggerating my Negroid Features (1981) and the photographic series Safe #1-4 (1990). In 1987, Piper and Evans were finally divorced. Later, after she had spent two years caring for her, Piper's elderly mother died in 1994.
On completing a two-year sojourn as a visiting lecturer at the Royal Danish Academy of Art in 2005-7 and also spending time in Berlin, Piper discovered her name was on the Transportation Security Administration's "Suspicious Traveller Watch List". Refusing to return to the United States until her name was removed from the list, her position at Wellesley was terminated in 2008. The situation left Piper filled with deep disappointment, as she explained, "I owe everything I am to my birth, upbringing, and education in the United States. So I would have preferred my achievements to be a source of pride to my country of origin. Unfortunately, it is not set up to tolerate achievements like mine from someone like me, because people like me are not supposed to exist."
Late Period
Following the loss of her post at Wellesley College Piper emigrated permanently to Berlin, where she continues to live and work, finding the culture of "self-erasure and self-reinvention" a constant source of artistic inspiration. In a recent interview she said that "In Berlin, the layers of meaning, history and culture are infinite. Every day and every encounter is an adventure and every person I pass on the street is an inexhaustible store of memory and tradition." She has not returned to America since 2007.
Within her artistic practice Piper has expanded her subject matter to include Vedic philosophical concepts, which she combines with the themes of loss, desire, and transcendence and her previous focus on personal experience as a catalyst for social reflection. In 2002, Piper founded the Adrian Piper Research Archive (APRA) as a resource for students, scholars, curators, collectors, and writers. Piper extended the role of the foundation in 2009 to fund the APRA Foundation Multi-Disciplinary Fellowship, a research grant designed for high achievers in two or more fields of scholarship and in 2018 she added the APRA Foundation Berlin Philosophy Dissertation Fellowship, as a research grant to fund cross-cultural courses of study.
Piper published a major two-volume study on Kant in 2008, Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception and Rationality and The Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception, a culmination of 34 years' worth of research into the distinctions between the Humean and Kantian conceptions of the self, motivation, and rationality. The Berlin Journal of Philosophy was founded by Piper in 2011 and is still going strong today, a publication that she describes as "as an open-access, peer-reviewed international journal that innovates in adhering strictly to simultaneous policies of blind submission, double-blind review, and anti-plagiarism."
On her 64th birthday, Piper officially announced that she was "retired from being black," uploading an enhanced photograph onto her website where her skin color had been changed from "café au lait" to the shade of "elephant hide". She accompanied the picture with the caption, "Henceforth, my new racial designation will be neither black nor white but rather 6.25% grey, honouring my 1/16th African heritage. Please join me in celebrating this exciting new adventure in pointless administrative precision and futile institutional control."
In a further bid to present an accurate public image that aligned to her own sense of identity, in 2013 Piper reacted angrily against her Wikipedia page, which she said "...had apparently not been fact checked", by building a new one on her own website. Details featured on this new page included a breakdown of her ancestral heritage and her artistic and philosophical careers, as well as of her lifelong yoga practice. Piper's self-reconstructed Wikipedia page acts as a confrontational statement against varied inaccuracies that have been published about her and a deliberate move to reassert her own agency. As she explains, "The factual errors in the official Wikipedia page were so numerous and glaring ... that it would have been a waste of time to try to get that right. The reconstructed page was a last resort." Piper's reconstructed page highlights her disagreements with Wikipedia's editorial policy, and lists at its head her exchanges with the website's administrators.
In 2018, Piper published the memoir Escape to Berlin, an intimate portrayal of her life story interspersed with poems and artworks. In 2018 Piper was also awarded a major retrospective at New York's MoMA, on which she observed, "I do not need to have another retrospective ever again, because the MoMA retrospective will never be surpassed."
The Legacy of Adrian Piper
Piper's distinctly confrontational ability to address pertinent topics around racial segregation and stereotyping have established her voice as one which is fearless, powerful, and hugely influential. Her ability to excel in the two distinct fields of visual art and academic philosophy also demonstrates a rare tenacity, while her ongoing support for others to follow her example in doing so through her APRA research grants supports the next generation of interdisciplinary creative voices.
Cornelia Butler, former chief curator of drawing at MoMA, sees Piper's work as representing someone who is "always there, and the work always looks current," adding, "since the '90s, there's a generation of artists whose work is really almost impossible without her". This is particularly true of female artists, with figures as diverse as Cindy Sherman and Jenny Holzer directly influenced by Piper. Sherman's experimental drag photography reveals the ongoing influence of Piper's work in its representation of distinct and constructed identities, for example. Holzer, and other artists like Barbara Kruger, similarly continue to question prescribed societal roles through confrontational language and imagery in a manner derived at least in part from Piper's pioneering work.
But perhaps Piper's strongest legacy today can be felt through artists of color and/or mixed racial heritage, particularly those whose art raises awareness of cultural divisions or the deeply ingrained racism still prevalent in contemporary society. Notable examples of these artists include Carrie Mae Weems, whose honest photographs of African American family dynamics share similar subject matter to Piper's work in the 1980s and 90s, Lorna Simpson's multi-media autobiographical art and Ellen Gallagher's mixed media collages that question society's "ordering principles". Instances of Piper's influence can also be seen in Kara Walker's intricate silhouettes, and Glenn Ligon's complex, layered language of "intertextuality", or the use of the relation of different texts to each other to create meaning.