Post 3

            On my trip to New York a few weeks ago I went to go see the Adrian Piper exhibition in the MoMA. Adrian Piper worked addresses ostracism, otherness, radical passing and racism. Much of her work is inspiring to me as a half Latina, half white American woman. She looks to tackle the construction of identity in race that society has constructed for us. In the exhibition, I went to go see on Adrian Piper, she created a tall tower in an all-white room with a black man on a TV in the middle of the tower. All Four sides of the white tower had different sides of the man’s head. After he was done speaking, he would turn to the other side and continue to repeat himself. He was saying, “I’m not race, I’m not stupid, I’m not dirty, I’m not smelly, I’m not evil, I’m not horny” and more. He was naming different stereotypes that society has created for black men in this country in a very raw and open way.

            Some themes of this exhibition included a lot of self-reflection. My final project actual has to do with self-reflection and the stereotypes of Hispanic women. Another part of this exhibition was that they had mirrors all along the top part of the walls, kind of like Piper wanted people to look at themselves and see the stereotypes about their race as the man on the TV was disregarding all of his. The artist addressed identity by talking in a raw way about stereotypes and how we have made those stereotypes into our identity. As I was sitting inside the exhibition listening to this man speak on the TV by saying he is not his stereotypes, I was thinking and asking myself, how many stereotypes have we been taught to believe are true about our race and how many of them have we let become our identity? I knew for myself I developed the stereotype of a Hispanic woman always needing to be tough on men and taking on the role of the caregiver of the home without thinking twice about the man taking on some of the responsibilities in the home. This exhibition really makes you think about yourself and your stereotypes and think, how does this define me and who am I exactly?

            Much of Piper’s portraits portray her as having black features and making them more prominent. She is light skinned black woman, and identifies as black. Much like myself, I am a half white and half Hispanic woman, but if people ask what I mainly identify as, it is that I am Hispanic. I feel like Piper wanted to continue to remind people through her work that she was black because she felt like society was trying to take that piece of her identity away from her because she did not look like the “typical black woman” in America. One of her self-portraits, entitled Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features, is one of the portraits I feel that really capture the heart and passion behind much of Piper’s work. Her work looked to engage and shock people of her unconventional and raw ways of approaching the idea of self and the concept of identity through her art work. She put herself completely out there, much like how she did for her Catalysis series and how she was walking around New York wearing a Wet Paint sign as she is wearing clothes drenched in vinegar, water, and other substances.

            Through Pipers work at the MoMA, I feel as though she and the curators wanted to get the subject of race and discrimination to continue to go on, because we as humans tend to get into a certain political topic as it becomes big on the new because something might have happened in our nation to spark the conversation. For example, there was a period of time where in our nation black men were being killed for absolutely no reason. After about a year into the Black Lives Matter movement, society began to die down on the topic of black men (and women) being a target still in America. In the Synthesis of intuitions, Piper really held tackled the concept of the stereotypes of black men and used a black man to dismiss all the stereotypes. I feel as though this whole exhibition was to dismiss the stereotypes being given (and using a black man because of all the conflicts and news sparking the Black Lives Matter movement) and to bring us to a place of self-reflection on how we are, who we are, how we relate to our stereotypes, how we can improve as people and how we can begin to acknowledge that we are the ones who create our self-image and our identity. We need to look inside ourselves to dismiss our stereotypes and only then can we begin to build our identity.

Works Cited

Adrian Piper: A Canvas of Concerns -- Race, Racism and Class, 24 Dec. 1999, www.asu.edu/cfa/wwwcourses/art/SOACore/piper-art-review.html.

“Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016.” Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016 | MoMA, www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3924.

Cotter, Holland. “Adrian Piper: The Thinking Canvas.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 19 Apr. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/arts/design/adrian-piper-review-moma.html.

Dellas, Mary. “This Performance Artist Wants to Know How You View Her.” The Cut, 27 Mar. 2018, www.thecut.com/2018/03/this-performance-artist-wants-to-know-what-you-think-of-her.html.