Allen Ruppersberg, Placemats and Poems (2008)
Allen Ruppersberg followed in the tradition of the travelling bard by performing and selling poems at reduced prices during the time of the fair. Setting up an ad-hoc stall inside the Koenig bookstore, Ruppersberg brought some of the anti-commercialism of the beat era to the slick marketplace of the art fair.
Allen Ruppersberg (b.1944) is an American artist based in New York and Santa Monica.
Ruppersberg’s work is in numerous private collections and major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work was included in ‘The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography’ (2003-04) at the Walker Art Center and traveled to UCLA Hammer Museum, MARCO, Spain, the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, and Miami Art Central. He is one of the artists in the upcoming Pompidou exhibition, ‘Los Angeles – Paris, 1955-1985’.
Recent solo exhibitions include: ‘Selected Works’, Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles (2008) and ‘The Singing Posters’, a touring exhibition whose venues included Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University; University Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; Jurgen Becker; Karin Guenther / Nina Borgmann Galleries, Hamburg (2004-06). Recent group exhibitions include: ‘ PAYDAY’, Greene Naftali Gallery, New York (2008); ‘Allan Kaprow—Art as Life’, The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007); ‘Romantischer Konzeptualismus/Romantic Conceptualism’, Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nürnberg, Germany (2007).
