Hammer Museum Presents Major Retrospective of Chouinard Alum Allen Ruppersberg

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Allen Ruppersberg, 'The Singing Posters: Allen Ginsberg's Howl by Allen Ruppersberg (Parts I-III),' 2003/2005 (detail). Commercially printed letterpress posters. | Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. | Photo: Courtesy Skirball Museum, Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles and Robert Wedemeyer.

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Allen Ruppersberg, 'Greetings from California,' 1972. Acrylic on canvas. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. | Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art.

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Allen Ruppersberg, 'Honey, I rearranged the collection asking myself the question—who is the found of conceptual art?,' 2010. Silkscreen and collaged photographs on paper. | Image: Courtesy Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles.

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Allen Ruppersberg, 'Meals from Al’s Café,' 1969. Mix media, aluminum pie tins, paper placemats. | Courtesy the artist; photos: Gary Krueger; digital scan: Augusta Wood.

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Allen Ruppersberg, 'Cover Art (Space Adventures),' 1985. Collage of commercially printed ephemera, mixed media, Dymo tape on four panels. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. | Photo courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

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Allen Ruppersberg, 'Self-Portrait Making a Face Like Barney Bear,' 1975. Graphite and colored pencil on paper. | Courtesy Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles; photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

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Allen Ruppersberg, 'Good Dreams, Bad Dreams (What Was Sub-Literature?),' 1996. Mixed-media installation with nineteen hand-painted signs, stanchion sign, four color photographs, forty books from the artist’s collection. Collection Aïshti Foundation, Beirut. | Installation view of the exhibition 'Good Dreams, Bad Dreams,: American Mythologies.' | Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli.

On Sunday, Feb. 10, Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968-2018 – the first comprehensive American survey devoted to the conceptual artist and Chouinard Art Institute graduate (1967) in more than three decades – opens at the Hammer Museum.

Organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the show features more than 120 works covering roughly 50 years of Ruppersberg’s career employing “elements of popular culture – newspapers, magazines, band posters and more – to create curious juxtapositions of image and text.” (Los Angeles Times).

Works on display include photography, assemblage, print and more, on loan from public and private collections, many exhibited in the U.S. for the first time. Also on display will be the artist’s landmark participatory environments Al’s Grand Hotel (1971) and Al’s Café (1969) – a surreal restaurant staged in Downtown L.A. where diners were served inedible objects until it was shut down by police and the artist and waitresses arrested – which helped cement Los Angeles’ place as a capital of conceptual art.

Born in Cleveland, Ruppersberg moved to Los Angeles in 1962 to attend Chouinard, intending to become an illustrator. During his early years on the West Coast, however, he became a key member of an emerging and influential scene of American conceptual artists exploring the interface of language, image, and mass culture alongside former CalArts colleagues John Baldessari (Chouinard 59) and Ed Ruscha (Chouinard 60), and others like Douglas Huebler (CalArts dean 1976-1988), William Leavitt, Allan McCollum and William Wegman. By the mid-1970s, Ruppersberg was splitting his time between Los Angeles, New York and Europe, using a variety of materials to explore, in his own words, “the vocabulary of the ordinary.”

As the Hammer press release explains, “Perhaps more than any other artist of his generation, he has mined the nuances of culture through its visual details, unsung conventions and modes of the everyday, often welcoming the involvement of the viewer as social participant, an aspect of his work that has had particular resonance with a younger generation of artists.”

Organized into four parts, the exhibition examines major periods in Ruppersberg’s career: his earliest site-specific projects and photo works; works inspired by books and other writing; pieces demonstrating his process of translating the archival into art; and his later works memorializing fellow artists, including Robert Rauschenberg and Allen Ginsburg.

Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property will be on view through May 12, 2019, with exhibition tours and public programs running throughout the spring. A public opening party takes place on Saturday, Feb. 9, and a conversation between the artist and Walker Art Center senior curator Siri Engberg takes place on Sunday, Feb. 10.