Born in New York, Adrian Piper studied at the city’s School of Visual Arts and later at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., where she received a Ph.D. in philosophy. As a professor of philosophy, Piper has written extensively on racism, xenophobia, and stereotyping. As an artist, she has worked in a variety of idioms, from performance and video to photography and drawing, seeking to effect change in racist attitudes by exposing their deep-rooted sources; “I am interested in truth rather than in beauty,” she has asserted. 27

Vanilla Nightmares #2 is the second of a group of twenty charcoal and crayon drawings that Piper began in 1986 on pages from the New York Times. By choosing this august newspaper as the ground for her series, Piper suggested that advertising and “factual” reportage contain hidden messages that feed prejudice in insidious ways. In this work, she executed two charcoal renderings and handprinted an abbreviated text, in red crayon, over a spread from the newspaper’s June 20, 1986, issue. At the left, sprawled across several articles dealing with apartheid, is a reclining black nude female whose impassive gaze belies her availability, indicated not only by her outstretched limbs but also by the column of type that rises between her open legs.

At the right, on a page dedicated to sports, a large, bald head of a black person, its eyes blank and gender undefined, floats beneath the words “SOLUTION––SOLUTION––/THE BLA K/ SPACE.” The phrase “bla[n]k space” underscores the expressionless character of the large head and refers to a discussion, on the opposite page, of a form of official censorship according to which South African newspapers published blank, white spaces where articles or photographs that the government found objectionable should have been. This “solution” inevitably rendered the excised information more powerful than had it been allowed to appear. Nonetheless, such deletions deny real knowledge as well and contribute to the blankness, as seen in face at the right. Piper reiterated her indictment of the suppression of information by erasing the delineation of a muscle on the inner right leg of the nude female, as well as part of her left breast. Piper’s figures, aptly described by art critic Lucy Lippard as “impassive intruders [that] infiltrate and overlay the marching columns of print, emerging from the shadows like slaves whispering behind the plantation house,” are at once haunting and threatening, the stuff of nightmares for those in power. 28 (DAN/MP)