Identity and Performance

Identity is constantly in flux, constructed, negotiated, muted, and mutable. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, artists have performed their own or other identities in critical, biting, and sometimes humorous ways. In works like those by Rasheed Araeen and Adrian Piper, the artists take on stereotyped identities—a Pakistani immigrant and a Black man—to document and deconstruct them, questioning how they are made visible in art and art history.