[Academy Lectures, 2014.04.03]

Piper’s lecture «Lessons from the Playbook of Second-Wave Feminism» is a candid appraisal of the achievements and shortcomings of the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, based in her participation in that movement. It explores the global legacy of second-wave feminism for the present day, and proposes some measures for completing its unfinished business. Adrian Piper (b. 1948) is a first-generation Conceptual artist and analytic philosopher. Her artwork, in a variety of traditional and nontraditional media, explores the limits of the self and individual identity in the social and political context. In 1987 she became the first tenured African American woman professor in the field of philosophy. She has taught philosophy at Georgetown, Harvard, Michigan, Stanford and UCSD, with a specialization in metaethics and Kant. For her refusal to return to the United States while listed as a Suspicious Traveler on the U.S. Transportation Security Administration’s Watch List, Wellesley College forcibly terminated her tenured full professorship in philosophy in 2008. In 2011 she was awarded the title of Professor Emeritus by the American Philosophical Association. Her artwork has most recently won the 2012 College Art Association Artist Distinguished Body of Work Award for having «since the late 1960s… profoundly influenced the language and form of Conceptual Art» and a Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award 2014 for «distinguished work as a philosopher and conceptual artist». She has studied and practiced yoga since 1965, and lives and works in Berlin. Piper runs the APRA Foundation Berlin, which administers the Foundation’s annual Multi-Disciplinary Fellowship