Mounted next to three black-and-white photographs of the artist standing before a mirror, the short statement says that Ms. Piper’s “critique of identity politics and desire to distance herself from being categorized as a ‘black artist’ ” led her to refuse reproduction rights for the work to appear in the exhibition catalog. However, the work has been included in the exhibition anyway to “highlight the urgency” of issues around art and racial identity.
Artists are regularly included in exhibitions dedicated to aesthetic movements or curatorial conceits they don’t agree with. It’s just that “Embodied: Black Identities” deals with a category — race — that historically defined one’s status, not just as an artist, but as a human being in this country.
