Allen Ruppersberg, Zabar Visiting Artist Lecture
Hunter MFA, Second Floor Flex Space
205 Hudson Street
New York, NY
October 23, 7pm
Since the late 1960s, with works included in such seminal exhibitions of Conceptual Art as Live in Your Head/When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland and Seth Siegelaub’s infamous One Month in New York, Allen Ruppersberg has been among the most visually inventive and intellectually inquisitive artists to emerge from the movement. Over his long career, his work has explored the slippages of language, the weight and unreliability of memory, and the strangeness of photograph and the mechanically reproduced image. From his early Picture of Dorian Gray, which presents Oscar Wilde’s story of painting, artistic influence, and life and death copied out in long hand across 20 six-foot square canvases, to The Singing Posters: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, the beat poet’s groundbreaking poem spelled out phonetically and printed in block letters across over 200 vibrantly colored commercial advertising posters, interspersed with advertisements for fairs and festivals and concerts, his work has intertwined reading and looking, and probed ideas of authorship and voice. Ruppersberg’s ongoing examinations of image, language, and memory are most often pursued through the materials of American vernacular culture: commercial advertising posters, old magazines, album covers, found films, and postcards drawn from a storehouse of materials he has collected over decades.
Allen Ruppersberg currently lives and works in New York and Santa Monica, California. Recent solo exhibitions include Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2018); traveling to Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in 2019; Air de Paris, Paris (2016); Plug In Institue of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg, Canada (2016); Skirball Culture Center, Los Angeles (2015); Greene Naftali, New York (2014); MFC-Michèle Didier, Paris (2014); Greengrassi, London (2014); Wiels, Brussels (2014); and The Art Institute of Chicago (2012). His work is in the collections of numerous museums internationally, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York.
ABOUT THE JUDITH ZABAR VISITING ARTISTS PROGRAM
In November 2007, Hunter College received a generous commitment to establish the Judith Zabar Visiting Artist Program Fund. The Fund has allowed Hunter to bring a series of internationally recognized artists to campus to work directly with students in the MFA program, in master classes, critical seminars, and private tutorials, providing students with the unique opportunity to interact with top practitioners in the field. Zabar Visiting Artists also present public lectures where they discuss their work, engage in conversation with members of Hunter’s faculty, and with Hunter’s broader student community and the general public. Past Zabar artists have included: Vito Acconci, Janine Antoni, Julie Ault, Robert Barry, Dawoud Bey, Tania Bruguera, Mel Chin, Peter Doig, Nicole Eisenman, Rochelle Feinstein, Charles Gaines, Alfredo Jaar, Joan Jonas, Martin Kersels, Jeff Koons, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Lockhart, Robert Longo, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Christian Marclay, Kerry James Marshall, Tracey Moffatt, Matt Mullican, Wangechi Mutu, Gabriel Orozco, Laura Owens, Trevor Paglen, Elizabeth Peyton, Paul Pfeiffer, William Pope L., Walid Ra’ad, Yvonne Rainer, Doris Salcedo, Shahzia Sikander, Michael Smith, Frances Stark, Fred Tomaselli, Nari Ward, Carrie Mae Weems, and Stanley Whitney.