Her work addresses how and why those involved in more than one discipline may experience professional ostracism, otherness, racial passing, and racism by using various traditional and non-traditional media to provoke self-analysis.

[14] In 1981 Piper published an essay entitled "Ideology, Confrontation and Political Self-Awareness", in which she discusses concepts she explores through her art.

Piper argues that the beliefs we tend to hold onto the longest, and often avoid exposing to examination, are those that allow us to maintain an understanding that makes sense to us about who we are and how we exist within the world at large.

[16] Many of her works either allude to or directly incorporate eastern philosophy in them, for example, Mythic Being: Doing Yoga (1975), The Color Wheel Series (2000), and Mokshamudra Progression (2012).

In the 1970s, she began a series of street performances under the collective title, Catalysis, which included actions such as painting her clothes with white paint, wearing a sign that read "Wet Paint", and going to Macy's department store to shop for gloves and sunglasses; stuffing a huge white towel into her mouth and riding the bus, subway, and Empire State Building elevator; and dousing herself in a mixture of vinegar, eggs, milk, and cod liver oil and then spending a week moving around New York's subway and bookstores.

[19][20] Catalysis VII involved Piper visiting a museum, chewing gum loudly, and holding a purse full of ketchup.

The Catalysis performances were meant to catalyze challenges that constituted the order of the social field, "at the level of dress, sanity, and the distinction between public and private acts.

[21] Piper's Mythic Being series, started in 1973, saw the artist dressed in a wig and mustache and performing publicly as a "third world, working class, overly hostile male.

Piper located the roots of funk in African tribal music and saw it as integral to the growing presence of black cultural figures in America and the ongoing struggle for equal rights.

Piper began the lessons by playing samples of music and instructing participants in specific dance moves, while gradually introducing anecdotes of black history and culture into her presentation.

By engaging audiences in active participation, Piper saw herself as creating an early work of relational aesthetics or what might be described as social practice.

As documented in a video by Sam Samore, the experience transcended academic didacticism in favor of social exchange; Piper's mantra for the work was, "Get down and party together.

She argued that these fallacies lead to the Illusion of Omniscience, which she defined as "[b]eing so convinced of the infallibility of your own beliefs about everyone else that you forget you are perceiving and experiencing as other people from a perspective that is in its own ways just as subjective and limited as theirs.

In an effort to challenge gender norms, Piper explored the negative associations made about a woman sitting alone at a bar and the assumption that she is seeking the male gaze.

To combat these norms between 1986 and 1990 she would pass out "My Calling Card #2" to request onlookers respect her privacy and to convey that being alone does not equate to her intending to be picked up.

Racial passing is addressed in another of Piper's performance pieces, "Cornered" (1988), where in a video recording she declares to an audience, "I'm black".

[30] Piper's, Everything #5.2 (2004), is a piece of mirrored glass shaped like a tombstone that layers the reflection of the viewer, the text, "Everything Will Be Taken Away", and the internal structures behind the plaster of the gallery wall.

In a statement accompanying the award, the jury said: "Piper has reformed conceptual practice to include personal subjectivity—of herself, her audience, and the public in general."

[7] Art critic Michael Brenson asserted that Piper's work "cut through the frozen sea in people and [led] them into areas of themselves they did not know existed.

[43] In 2015, she was awarded the Golden Lion for best artist [12][13] of the 2015 Venice Biennale for her participation in Okwui Enwezor's central show, "All the World's Futures".

[45] Piper received the Käthe-Kollwitz-Preis 2018 of the Akademie der Künste, an award that goes to an artist working on an international level and analytical philosopher, who has had a considerable influence on American conceptual art since the mid-1960s.