NEW YORK—From March 31 to July 22, 2018, The Museum of Modern Art will present the most comprehensive exhibition to date of the work of Adrian Piper (American, born 1948), the result of a four-year collaboration between Piper and Christophe Cherix and David Platzker, of The Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Drawings and Prints; and Connie Butler, Chief Curator, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Comprising over 280 works gathered from public and private collections around the world, the exhibition, which will be seen in its entirety only at The Museum of Modern Art, will occupy the Museum’s entire sixth floor—the first time that entire level has been devoted to the work of a living artist.
The retrospective will provide an in-depth review of the full range of Piper’s work in diverse mediums: works on paper, video, multimedia installation, performance, painting, sound, and photo/text-based graphics spanning over five decades. Accompanying the exhibition will be a catalogue including essays by Christophe Cherix, Connie Butler, David Platzker, Okwui Enwezor, and Adrian Piper; and a reader with essays by Diarmuid Costello, Jörg Heiser, Kobena Mercer, Nizan Shaked, Vid Simoniti, and Elvan Zabunyan – both published by the Museum; and a new autobiographical text by Piper published by the APRA Foundation Berlin. The exhibition will be Piper’s first American museum exhibition in over ten years and her first since receiving the Golden Lion Award for Best Artist at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.
“It has been a privilege for us all to work with Piper in mounting this uncompromising exhibition, which will vastly expand our understanding of the Conceptual and post-Conceptual movements and Piper’s pivotal position among both her peers and later generations of artists,” said Glenn D. Lowry, The Museum of Modern Art’s Director.
“I have been deeply honored and very moved by the curators’ invitation to do this exhibition,” added Piper. “It is a pleasure to collaborate with them on it. The Museum of Modern Art is offering me a unique and invaluable opportunity to make a much larger selection of work available to a much larger and more global audience than has ever been possible before. It is a terrific adventure.”
Adrian Piper has consistently produced groundbreaking, transformative work that has profoundly shaped the form and content of Conceptual art since the 1960s. Strongly inflected by her longstanding involvement with philosophy and yoga, her pioneering investigations into the political, social, psychological, and spiritual potential of Conceptual art have had an incalculable influence on artists working today.
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