In 2005 Adrian Piper secretly emigrated from the United States. Several months passed before anyone realized she had disappeared. She resurfaced in Berlin and has lived there ever since. Piper has consistently and firmly refused to return to the U.S. or explain why she left. Many assume it was because she discovered her name on the U.S. Department of Transportation Security’s Suspicious Travelers Watch List. Others point to Wellesley College’s forcible termination of her tenured Full Professorship. Yet others speculate that George W. Bush’s presidency, or American racism, or the invasion of Iraq compelled her to leave. All of these conjectures are groundless. Escape to Berlin: A Travel Memoir is a gripping autobiographical narrative that provides a full account of the facts. 110 full-color illustrations throughout.

Bilingual edition (English/German)

Adrian Piper (b. 1948) is a first-generation Conceptual artist who started exhibiting her artwork internationally at the age of twenty and received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1981. She taught philosophy for 30 years. Her two-volume study in Kantian metaethics, Rationality and the Structure of the Self (2013) integrates desire into reason and standard decision theory into classical predicate logic. Her mixed media installation, The Probable Trust Registry, won the Golden Lion Award for Best Artist at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.

Piper’s seventh traveling retrospective, Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions 1965-2016, is on view now at MoMA through July 22, 2018.