Abstract
While ambling through the special exhibition gallery space on the Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA) sixth floor where nearly three hundred works by the visual artist, philosopher, and self-avowed yoga enthusiast Adrian Piper were on view in Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016 (March 31–July 22, 2018), I found myself surprisingly overcome by an intense bout of emotions. Minutes after they had first piqued my curiosity, I decided to make my way over to a trio of what, from a distance, looked like family photos—one in black-and-white, and two in color—to read the passage on display alongside them. The text, I discovered upon scanning it attentively, told the story of a married couple that had once shared a deep passion for socializing, dancing, loving one another, and cigarette smoking. Although the wife had given up the latter habit in her fifties, contracting emphysema some time thereafter, the husband found it impossible to desist from puffing. Cancer would ultimately take over his pharynx, throat, and mouth, leaving her to watch him waste away into death. She, the passage explained, would press on for as long as she could, but when the struggle to breathe became too overwhelming, she took to praying to rejoin her love, smiling at the thought of their eventual reunion.
