Adrian Piper Awarded Kaiserring Prize for Conceptual Art and Philosophical Practice

Adrian Piper will receive the Kaiserring award from the German city of Goslar, an honor established in 1975. Her career, beginning in the 1970s, includes early work at the Seth Siegelaub Gallery in New York and conceptual performances addressing identity, race, and gender. Notable pieces involve painting herself with white wet paint and entering Macy's department store, and creating the male alter ego 'Mythic Being' for public actions. In the 1980s, she led Funk Lessons, introducing white audiences to black music history and racism through dance classes advertised without art context. Piper, who holds a doctorate in philosophy, founded the peer-reviewed Berlin Journal of Philosophy in 2011, editing it from Germany where she has resided since 2005. She gained a Golden Lion at the 2015 Venice Biennale for The Probable Trust Registry, where visitors signed contracts with themselves. A fifty-year retrospective at MoMA occurred in 2018. The award ceremony this autumn will include last year's winner, Hans Haacke, pending pandemic conditions. Previous Kaiserring recipients include Henry Moore, Max Ernst, Joseph Beuys, Christo, and Jörg Immendorff.