Allen Ruppersberg Cover Art (Space Adventures), 1985 Mixed media collage 4 panels; 40 x 60 inches each Courtesy of the artist and Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, and Santa Monica Museum of Art | Photo by Bruce Morr
The Santa Monica Museum of Art is currently presenting Allen Ruppersberg: You and Me or The Art of Give and Take, an exhibition that features two new interactive installations by the artist.
Ruppersberg (Chouinard 67) is a key member of the group of American conceptual artists—alongside former CalArts colleagues such as John Baldessari (Chouinard 59) and Douglas Huebler—whose influential work, as practitioners and teachers, has helped shape the course of contemporary art practice.
Created expressly for the SMMoA show, the two large-scale installations—The Never Ending Book Part 2/Art and Therefore Ourselves and The Sound and the Story/The Hugo Ball Award for 20th-Century Graphics (both 2009)—consist of imagery, sound and various objects from Ruppersberg’s extensive archive of 20th-century American ephemera.
The exhibition, which continues through Dec. 19, also includes a selection of earlier collages and drawings that provide a context for the new pieces.
For more of Ruppersberg’s work, see this web project. Also available online is a comprehensive and illuminating essay by Allan McCollum on Ruppersberg’s practice.
Allen Ruppersberg: You and Me or The Art of Give and Take
Santa Monica Museum of Art
Bergamot Station G1
2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, Calif.
Allen Ruppersberg The Gift and the Inheritance (Strive and Succeed), 1989 Pencil on paper 22 5/8 x 28 ½ inches Collection of the Fisher Landau Center for Art, Courtesy of Santa Monica Museum of Art | Photo by Bruce Morr