Adrian Piper’s Funk Lessons sought to reveal the inner-feelings and tensions that divided certain cultures and ease those tensions through an integration of one culture into another culture. She used the rhythms, songs, and dances of lower class African- American funk music and tought them to middle or upper class white people in order to reveal and ease the racial tensions between the two distinctly different cultures.



“In my experience, people who think “race is over” are either European American, rich, young, or some combination of the above, I know of no ordinary African American over the age of 30 who holds this view.” Adrian Piper Interview Mapping Mindsets.

“ American racism is frozen at the stage of denial and I don’t think American society is capable of moving beyond that stage.” Adrian Piper Interview Mapping Mindsets.

“My work doesn’t address any particular audience, or race of audience. Nor does it seek to “disturb or enlighten them about forms of injustice.” It targets particular attitudes through humor, mimicry and/or the use of grammatical second person; and allows different individual viewers to sitiuate themselves in relation to those attitudes.” Mapping Mindsets.

“The Integrity in Piper’s work is this: unlike many artists whose concepts are endpoints in themselves, she understands art as an expedient vehicle to a reality beyond, to questions of existence, relations, and self-knowledge” Adrian Piper: Goodbye to Easy Listening. Diana C. Stoll.

'The union of the personal with the political often makes such work seem excessively confrontational or didactic to some viewers. I think this is because art functions for me as not only a medium of exploration but also a medium of communication between me and the viewer” Adrian Piper in Adrian Piper: Generali Foundation, Vienna.

“She answers the question herself in the piece by saying that it is an absurd question, that being able to dance isn't connected to race, but the point is the discussion, of course, and the gentle inversion of something: what is it that these people lack, and can we help them?” David Lillington in Adrian Piper: Generali Foundation, Vienna.