Forget It,

1991

Piper is an African American conceptual and performance artist who foregrounds issues of race and gender in her art. In this print, Piper combines photographs taken for the New York Times and Black Star agency with an application for a credit card to create an image that is hypersexualized and politically charged. The print is similar to Piper’s other early 1990s works, in which she superimposed red-lettered captions such as the enigmatic "Forget It" onto news photographs and included drawings of the three wise monkeys who advocate, "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil." These textual messages add complexity to the visual representation of an African American man trapped behind an application for credit.