Adrian Piper is one of the artists in ‘Drawing Then’, Dominique Lévy Gallery New York, from January 27 until March 16, 2016.
In the 80’s she made a remarkable series of drawings: ‘Vanilla Nightmares’.
About:
Adrian Piper’s Vanilla Nightmares, which dates from 1986, is a series of drawings of angry African-American figures done directly on Times front pages that feature race-relations stories.
In a series of collage-drawings titled “Vanilla Nightmares” (1986-87), Piper challenged the notion of categories by forcing two incompatible stereotypes together. Here she reinvoked the fearsome persona of the black male by drawing black men on the pages of the New York Times so that they may be seen to be accosting the white models in fashion spreads or invading a credit card ad. In the latter work, Piper makes the slogan “membership has its privileges” sound like a barbed comment on racial identity.