Allen Ruppersberg (b. 1944, United States) is often considered as one of the first American conceptual artists. He graduated with a BFA from the Choinard Art Institute, now the California Institute of the Arts, in Los Angeles. Like many of his peers in the 1960s, he regarded art as having strong critical and political potential. Ruppersberg took as source material diverse items stemming from a distinct American form of popular culture of the mid-twentieth century. He participated in the groundbreaking 1969 exhibition When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle, Bern. His work has been exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions and can be found in permanent collections of museums internationally, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, among many others. He has participated in the Whitney Biennials (1970, 1975, 1991), Documenta V (1972) and Lyon Biennale (1997) as well.