LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Hammer Museum presents Adrian Piper: Concepts and Intuitions, 1965–2016, the most comprehensive West Coast exhibition to date of the work of Adrian Piper (b. 1948, New York). Organized by The Museum of Modern Art, this expansive retrospective features more than 270 works gathered from public and private collections from around the world, and encompasses a wide range of mediums that Piper has explored for over 50 years: drawing, photography, works on paper, video, multimedia installations, performance, painting, sculpture, and sound. On view from October 7, 2018 through January 6, 2019, Adrian Piper: Concepts and Intuitions, 1965–2016 is the first West Coast museum presentation of Piper’s works in more than a decade, and her first since receiving the Golden Lion Award for Best Artist at the 56th Venice Biennale of 2015 and Germany’s Käthe Kollwitz Prize in 2018.

Piper’s groundbreaking, transformative work has profoundly shaped the form and content of Conceptual art since the 1960s, exerting an incalculable influence on artists working today. Her investigations into the political, social, and spiritual potential of Conceptual art frequently address gender, race, and xenophobia through incisive humor and wit, and draw on her long-standing involvement with philosophy and yoga.

“Adrian Piper’s fifty-year career transcends traditional categories of art,” said Hammer Director Ann Philbin. “Her influence on a younger generation of artists is profound, and her work—from its conceptual beginnings to her most recent participatory works—are concise, moving, and sharply relevant to our contemporary moment.”

“In constant dialogue with what is both happening around her and with the discourses of contemporary art, from the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement in the 1970s, to her practices in philosophy and yoga which continue to inform her work today, Adrian Piper’s work unyieldingly engages the viewer,” said Connie Butler. “Her direct address becomes an integral part of the experience of her art.”

Throughout the duration of the Hammer’s exhibition, various performances will be enacted in the museum’s galleries. Piper’s 2012 The Humming Room interrogates our implicit trust in institutional authority, while also encouraging musical exploration of the voice. The Humming Room will be presented as a required passageway the viewer must traverse toward the end of the exhibition. 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 self-expression in any way they wish. In Everything #3 (2003)—to be enacted on the opening and closing weekends of the exhibition—performers wear sandwich boards with the message “EVERYTHING WILL BE TAKEN AWAY,” riffing both on traditional protest action and street advertisement. In other text-based works, such as My Calling Card #1 and #2, which include a performance component, visitors may take away small cards that question the reader’s racial and sexual biases and distribute them as appropriate. Additionally, for this exhibition the Hammer is partnering with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, which will also present work by Piper, from September 30 through January 6.