ENACTING OTHERS

The artists Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, Anna Deavere Smith, and Nikki S. Lee have all crossed racial, ethnic, gender, and class bou ndaries in works that they have conceived and performed. Cherise Smith analyzes their complex engagements with issues of identity th rough close readings of a significant performance, or series of performances, by each artist. She examines Pipers public embodiment of the Mythic Being, a working-class black man, during the early 1970s/ Antins full-time existence as the fictitious black balleri na Eleanor...[Read more]