letmypeopleshow:

Adrian Piper Pulls Out of Black Performance-Art Show

Venerable Conceptual artist requested that footage of her iconic “Mythic Being” performance be removed from “Radical Presence” at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, asserting it marginalizes African American artists.

In depriving students and the larger public from seeing her work at the Grey, the artist, who currently lives in Berlin and runs a foundation dedicated to art, philosophy, and yoga, has chosen to make a larger point about marginalization and otherness, themes that have dominated her work throughout her career.

The question is whether separate exhibitions are still needed to tell the stories that were left out and continue to be absent from conventional tellings of art history, or whether creating these separate spaces amounts to a kind of ghettoization that prevents the artwork from being considered on the larger stage.

Read more at artnews.com

Adrian Piper, I am the Locus (#1-5), 1975, oil crayon drawing on photograph. ALL IMAGES COURTESY SMART MUSEUM OF ART, THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, PURCHASE, GIFT OF CARL RUNGIUS, BY EXCHANGE, 2001.126a.

This, indeed: “The question is whether separate exhibitions are still needed to tell the stories that were left out and continue to be absent from conventional tellings of art history, or whether creating these separate spaces amounts to a kind of ghettoization that prevents the artwork from being considered on the larger stage.”