Adrian Piper
COLORED PEOPLE

Photographs: Adrian Piper

Text: Adrian Piper

Publisher: Book Works

286 pages

Year: 1991

Price: 700 €

Comments: Softcover with dust jacket, 28 x 21,5 cm, b&w photographs with colors drawing. In very good condition.

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This project was compiled and produced as an artist's book mock-up in 1987 for the travelling exhibition Coast to Coast: Women of Color National Artists' Book Project. My collaborators were self-selected from a group of thirty-six original invitees, including equal numbers of people of color and euroethnics, women and men. Each was asked to take eight photos of themselves, each expressing facially the corresponding colloquial metaphor of color as mood. I told them simply that I was going to sort their photos metaphorically, according to the color of their moods. I had originally intended the project as a lighthearted conceptual gesture with serious implications. But as responses began to come in, some of the equally serious prerequisites for being willing to participate began to dawn on me. First, my collaborators had to trust me not to use their images in a way that would make them look bad or silly. That is a hard thing to do in a profession that perceives success as a zero-sum game, in which one person's benefit is another's disadvantage. So I want above all to thank my collaborators for this expression of trust and friendship. Second, they had to be willing to accept my authority in delimiting the parameters of the piece, and not appropriate it for their own uses. So I want also to thank them for their recognition of the value of my vision as I articulated it to them, and for their disinterested contributions to it. Third, they had to have both a secure sense of humor about themselves and a vivid sense of the seriousness of the social issues involved. Each of these traits taken separately is rare enough; in combination exceptionally so. I feel privileged to know such individuals.

Fourth, they had to conceive the project as important and interesting enough to take time out from their extremely busy and overcommitted lives to participate. Again I thank them for sharing - and enlarging - the vision that fuels this piece. Finally, they had to be willing to put that vision, and themselves, on the line publicly, in print, without fear of being criticized, ridiculed, or professionally punished for having participated. This is perhaps hardest of all. So I want to thank my collaborators last but not least for their courage, their conviction, and their commitment.

Adrian Piper 1991

 

Tickled pink. Scarlet with embarrassment. Purple with anger. Blue. Green with envy. Jaundiced yellow. White with fear. Black depression.” Adrian Piper’s book is a collaboration with sixteen people who were asked to cut out these ‘metaphorical moods’ and record them as photographs which Piper then took responsibility for sorting, depending on her response to the expressions. According to Piper, the book “was intended as a light-hearted conceptual gesture with serious implications”. Colored People is a project that attempts to deal with two aspects of prejudgement; those made about others and those made about art that is delimited as political as a method of containment of what else it may be about, how richly politics may be defined.

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