Californian artist Allen Ruppersberg’s Fundraising Edition for the 2015 LA Art Book Fair is a color photograph from 1972: a portrait of Ruppersberg standing on a neighborhood sidewalk, regarding a stack of books that’s almost as tall as him. Some of the visible titles are On Poetry and Poets, Seven Science Fiction Novels of H. G. Wells, The Book of Thoth, The Real Jazz Old and New, and The Encyclopedia of Jazz. Mounted on MDF board, the photograph is nearly life-sized, enhancing the equivalency between the artist, the stack of books, and the photographic print.

Allen Ruppersberg (b. 1944 in Cleveland, Ohio) is considered one of the pillars of the Conceptual Art Movement. Ruppersberg uses text, images, printmaking and sculpture to explore the intersection of art, literature, and life. Unlike other contemporary Conceptual Artists, Ruppersberg’s work does not have an easily recognizable style or aesthetic. Instead, the medium and idea directly dictates the aesthetic output of the work. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, The Art Institute of Chicago, Greene Naftali in New York, among others. Ruppersberg’s work is held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.