Opening-Day Artist Talk: Allen Ruppersberg

"You want people to see something that is important, and it's your job as an artist to focus that somehow." Inside his studio in El Segundo, California, Allen Ruppersberg discusses the roles collecting and copying play in his practice—and how ephemera, from old comic strips and advertising signage to historical materials from the Walker Art Center Archives, makes its way into his art.

Allen Ruppersberg's conceptual art practice has for five decades focused on the American vernacular—its books, music, popular images, and everyday ephemera. "It's definitely about saving things that I think are worthwhile and that might disappear but that also goes back to the beginnings of thinking about what you want to make," the artist told  Hammer Museum curator Aram Moshayedi during the opening-day talk for Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968–2018, the artist’s first comprehensive US survey in more than 30 years. "You know you're making things out of ephemeral and throwaway stuff for a reason, and that's to say that this can be art too."