Allen Ruppersberg Sourcebook: Reanimating the 20th Century

The second volume in ICI's Sourcebook series turns four decades of Allen Ruppersberg's collected texts, images, films, records and ephemera into a working portrait of how a conceptual artist's work actually gets made.

Edited by Ruppersberg from archives split between his family home in Cleveland and his Los Angeles studio, the book is built around nine projects from 1978 to 2012 — among them his 1995 commission for the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations, his 1997 guidebook for the Münster Sculpture Project, and No Time Left to Start Again/The B and D of R 'n' R (2012), dedicated to the American vernacular of recorded music. Reproduced alongside them are the clippings, advertisements, photographs and printed matter he treats as raw material. Foreword by Kate Fowle, introduction by Constance M. Lewallen, design by General Working Group; 284 pages, full color, softcover with French-fold jacket.

Ruppersberg (b. 1944) belongs to the first generation of American conceptual artists, working across installation, photography, prints and books, and has collected American popular print matter and educational films of 1931–1967 for most of his career. ICI launched the Sourcebook series in 2011; each volume is edited by an artist from their own archive.