Jennie Waldow

Jennie studies postwar American and European art, with a focus on 1960s and 1970s Conceptualism. She has previously worked at the Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles Nomadic Division, and her areas of interest include Fluxus, artist's books and ephemera, political activism, and commercial procedures. 

Jennie is currently at work on a dissertation about the American artist Allen Ruppersberg (b. 1944). In particular, the project focuses on Ruppersberg’s engagement with the nebulous medium category of ephemera, defined by media scholar Mary Desjardins as “throw-away[s] which [are] not thrown away.” Unlike his peers in the Conceptual art movement of the 1960s and 1970s, whose work largely focused on the primacy of the idea over the object, Ruppersberg is primarily concerned with the aesthetic and informational potential of forgotten or easily discarded items. Based in Los Angeles for much of his career, Ruppersberg creates items such as posters, receipts, book jackets, and photocopies, arranging them into carefully designed, text-driven installations that invite close reading and examination. The dissertation positions his use of ephemera as a model for excavating neglected histories of objects within Conceptual art and its aftermath.