NEW YORK, NY.- From March 27 to July 22, 2018, The Museum of Modern Art presents the most comprehensive exhibition of the work of Adrian Piper (American, born 1948) to date with Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016. The exhibition is the result of a four-year collaboration between Piper and Christophe Cherix, Chief Curator in the Museum’s Department of Drawings and Prints, Connie Butler, Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and David Platzker, former Curator in the Museum’s Department of Drawings and Prints, with Tessa Ferreyros, Curatorial Assistant in the Museum’s Department of Drawings and Prints. A selection of works from the exhibition will travel, under the title Adrian Piper: Concepts and Intuitions, 1965– 2016, to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (October 7, 2018 –January 6, 2019), and Haus der Kunst, Munich (April 12–September 22, 2019).

Comprising over 290 works gathered from public and private collections around the world, this inclusive retrospective, which can be seen in its entirety only at the Museum of Modern Art, occupies the Museum’s entire sixth floor – the first time that entire level has been devoted to the work of a living artist. The exhibition encompasses the wide range of diverse mediums that Piper has explored for over 50 years: drawing, photography, works on paper, video, multimedia installation, performance, painting, sculpture, and sound. The exhibition is Piper’s first American museum exhibition in over 10 years, and her first since receiving the Golden Lion Award for Best Artist in the 56th Venice Biennale of 2015 and Germany’s Käthe Kollwitz Prize for 2018.

Challenging our assumptions about the social structures that shape the world around us, Adrian Piper has consistently produced groundbreaking, transformative work that has profoundly shaped the form and content of Conceptual art since the mid-1960s. Often drawing from her personal and professional experiences, including her engagement with philosophy and yoga, Piper’s pioneering and wide-ranging contributions have directly addressed gender, race, xenophobia, and, more recently, social engagement and self-transcendence. Despite tackling some of the most sobering and divisive issues of our time, she has—through the use of irony and penetrating wit—created a body of work that is as humorous as it is incisive.

Throughout the duration of the exhibition, various performances from Piper’s Everything series will be enacted in the galleries and on the sidewalks outside of the Museum. On Friday afternoons, as part of Everything #3 (2003), performers will picket the museum wearing sandwich boards reading “EVERYTHING WILL BE TAKEN AWAY,” riffing on both traditional protest actions and street advertisements. In Everything #10 (2007), a number of Museum staff will have the same phrase written on their foreheads in henna. As the text will be written in reverse, the message will be most easily legible when the wearers see their own reflection.

Piper’s 2012 The Humming Room interrogates our implicit trust in institutional authority, while also encouraging musical exploration of the voice. The Humming Room is being presented as a required passageway between the first two-thirds of the exhibition and the remaining sections. Blocking the passageway is a security guard and signage instructing visitors that “IN ORDER TO ENTER THE ROOM, YOU MUST HUM A TUNE. ANY TUNE WILL DO.” Visitors are met with a paradoxical proposition—an obligation to perform an idle, commonplace act of modest self-expression in any way they wish.

Another participatory work, The Probable Trust Registry: The Rules of the Game #1–#3 (2013), will be presented throughout the run of the show in the Museum’s sixth-floor galleries. This installation and group performance invites visitors to explore the experience of trust in oneself and others through the signing of social contracts that read, “I WILL ALWAYS BE TOO EXPENSIVE TO BUY,” “I WILL ALWAYS MEAN WHAT I SAY,” and “I WILL ALWAYS DO WHAT I SAY I AM GOING TO DO.”

What It’s Like What It Is #3 (1991), a newly acquired work that was first shown at MoMA in the 1991 DISLOCATIONS exhibition, occupies the Marron Atrium. Consisting of a gleaming white amphitheater with a nine-foot-tall column at its center and reflective mirrors surrounding its upper periphery, the installation’s sleek geometry recalls a work of Minimalist sculpture. On the four video screens embedded within the column are simultaneous views of an African American man; he speaks directly to the audience, negating a list of offensive racial stereotypes: “I’m not dirty, I’m not horny, I’m not selfish, I’m not evil …” while in the background, The Commodores sing of flying “far away from here, where my mind can be fresh and clear …”

MoMA is producing two publications to accompany the exhibition: an exhibition catalogue and a reader. The catalogue features the full range of Piper’s work through more than 300 illustrations, and essays by the exhibition curators that examine Piper’s extensive research into altered states of consciousness; the introduction of the Mythic Being—her subversive masculine alter-ego; her media and installation works produced after 1980; and the global conditions that illuminate the significance of her art. Previously unpublished texts by Piper lay out significant events in her personal history and her deeply felt ideas about the relationship between viewer and art object. Adrian Piper: A Reader presents a volume of new critical essays by Diarmuid Costello, Jörg Heiser, Kobena Mercer, Nizan Shaked, Vid Simoniti, and Elvan Zabunyan that investigate previously unexplored dimensions of Piper’s practice. Focused texts assess themes such as the Kantian framework that emerges from Piper’s philosophical studies; her contributions to first-generation Conceptual art; her turn from object works and works on paper to performance in the early 1970s; the work’s connection to her yoga practice; her ongoing exposure of and challenges to xenophobia and misogyny; and the relation between prevailing interpretations of her work and the viewers who engender them. Also to accompany the exhibition, Piper has released an autobiographical work, Escape to Berlin: A Travel Memoir, published by the APRA Foundation Berlin and currently available at the Museum Bookstore.

“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.”