"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." The word "catalysis" describes a chemical reaction caused by a catalytic agent that remains unchanged, and Piper viewed her audience's reaction as the unaffected agent. 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." In 2013, NYU's Grey Art Gallery played footage from Piper's 1973 work, "Mythic Being", in its exhibition entitled, "Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art". Piper rejected the inclusion, and requested that her work be removed from the exhibition because its inclusion further underlined the marginalization of nonwhite artists and was in direct opposition to the ideals that she fought to inspire in her viewers. Piper spent the summer of 1971 in her loft in New York City. During this time, she was reading Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781). She would read this book while doing various activities. Such activities consisted of yoga, fasting and writing. However, her experience reading this led to her feeling that she was losing connection to her physical self and was disappearing. She created the work Food for the Spirit to counteract this feeling. To perform the work, she would photograph herself periodically in front of a mirror and would chant parts of the book that led her to this feeling. The works consist of 14 gelatin silver prints as part of a binder. Between 1982 and 1984, Piper staged a series of events advertised as, "Funk Lessons", which invited participants to learn about the dance styles, culture, and history of funk music. 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. By exposing diverse audiences to the music of African American counterculture, Piper sought to create a dialogue about the cultural value of dance music and the politics of race and identity. Each "lesson" was advertised on postcards that specifically avoided labeling the event as a work of participatory art. 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.