For election week, the New Museum presented Adrian Piper’s Hardball, from the Decide Who You Are series, in the Museum’s Broadway window. 

Adrian Piper played a formative role in the emergence of Conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s and an even more crucial role in the development of identity-based art during the 1980s and 1990s. The exhibition at the New Museum explores the least understood aspect of Piper’s work: the relationship between aesthetics and political and emotional messages. Over the past thirty-five years, Piper has used artistic media in radical and inventive ways From forays into Minimalism and Conceptualism in the mid-1960s  to the politicized reinterpretation of these idioms in her work of the past two decades, it is Piper’s stylistic innovations that make her social commentary and her open invitation to the viewer to examine personal, and often unspoken, attitudes about race and gender, so effective, engaging, and persuasive.