Adrian Piper. Image via musiqology.wordpress.com. |
Venerable Conceptual artist withdraws from
"Radical Presence" at Grey Art Gallery, asserting it marginalizes
African American artists
From artforum.com,
October 31, 2013:
Robin
Cembalest reports in ARTnews that artist Adrian Piper has pulled her
work out of “Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art,” an
exhibition that’s currently up at the Grey Art Gallery. The monitor in the
gallery that played video documentation of Piper’s canonic work, Mythic
Being, 1973, in which she wore an Afro wig and wire-rimmed sunglasses and
challenged public perceptions while navigating the streets of New York, had
been shut off. Over the monitor, a note included parts of a letter from Piper
that shed some light on her reasons for declining to participate. Wrote Piper:
“I appreciate your intentions. Perhaps a more effective way to ‘celebrate [me],
[my] work and [my] contributions to not only the art world at large, but also a
generation of black artists working in performance,’ might be to curate
multi-ethnic exhibitions that give American audiences the rare opportunity to measure
directly the groundbreaking achievements of African American artists against
those of their peers in ‘the art world at large.’”
The note also included a response from the show’s curator,
Valerie Cassel Oliver, who wrote: “It is clear, that some experiences are hard
to transcend and that stigmas about blackness remain not only in the public’s
consciousness, but also in the consciousness of artists themselves. It is my
sincere hope that exhibitions such as ‘Radical Presence’ can one day prove a
conceptual game changer.”
Read ARTnews
web exclusive by Robin Cembalest here.
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