Adrian Piper’s Calling Cards UP154
From 1986 to 1990, the artist Adrian Piper handed out these “calling cards” at dinners and cocktail parties, in an ongoing performance designed to cleverly confront the racism of her peers; she had another version to rebuff unwanted touching at dance parties. Drawing on her experience as a light-skinned, black American woman often mistaken for white or white-passing, Piper’s work deals in both the material reality of race, sex, and class in America while engaging with social dynamics through performance, asking her audience to consider their positionality within the world.
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