New York, NY-Artist Allen Ruppersberg's ,The New Five Foot Shelf, commissioned by Dia Art Foundation, has won a 2004-2005 International Art Critics Association, US Chapter (AICA) award. Each year, the Association invites its four hundred members to nominate and vote for the exceptional exhibitions and art projects of the previous year. Created as part of Dia's series of Artist's Projects for the Web, Ruppersberg's web-based work has been selected in the "Best Exhibition of Art Using the Internet" category. The 2004-2005 awards were presented at the Association's February 2 ceremony, attended by museum curators, artists, and gallerists from around the country. Works commissioned by Dia and honored by AICA in web art category in the past include Glen Ligon's Annotations, which received a 2002-2003 award, and Jeanne Dunning's Tom Thumb: Notes Towards a Case History, honored in 2001-2002.

Ruppersberg's The New Five Foot Shelf is based on Dr. Charles William Eliot's Five Foot Shelf of Books, a 50-volume collection of readings in literature and poetry; biographies of major figures; texts on philosophy, religion, and folklore; and major historical writings through the twentieth century that Eliot deemed equivalent to a Harvard education. In 2001, Ruppersberg created his own version of Eliot's collection titled The New Five Foot Shelf. Also comprising fifty volumes, Ruppersberg's sculpture appears identical, from the outside, to Eliot's set of books, but includes texts written and compiled by Ruppersberg and forty-four posters, which, when fully assembled, reproduce on a one-to-one scale Ruppersberg's studio, densely packed with books, albums, posters, films, postcards, greeting cards, photographs, sheet music, and miscellaneous ephemera collected by the artist over two decades of artistic practice. Ruppersberg's project for Dia presents a version of The New Five Foot Shelf based on this earlier sculptural work but now specifically devised for the web.

In this, his first web-based project, Ruppersberg presents a select group of the texts from the earlier installation work, juxtaposed with several hundred images representing the artist's New York City studio, which he occupied for fifteen years until 2001. The New Five Foot Shelf launched on March 30, 2004 at http://www.diaart.org/ruppersberg/.

Allen Ruppersberg
Since his first solo exhibition in 1969 at Eugenia Butler Gallery in Los Angeles, Allen Ruppersberg has had numerous individual exhibitions at venues including ArtPace, San Antonio (2000); FRAC Limousin, Limoges, France (1999); Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble, France (1996); the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City (1985); Fort Worth Museum of Art (1977); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1977); and Pasadena Art Museum (1971). In addition to exhibiting his work in numerous group shows, he has also completed several individual projects and long-term installations, such as Al's Café (1969) in Los Angeles and Al's Grand Hotel (1971) in Hollywood, California; Evening Time Reading Time, a public installation in the city of Utrecht, the Netherlands (1991); and Library Floor Installation (1994) at De Appel, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Ruppersberg is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is the author of several books. A retrospective of his work entitled "One of Many-Origins and Variants" opened in November, 2005 at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in Germany. The show will travel to Dundee Contemporary Arts in Dundee, Scotland in April, and to the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain in the summer. Ruppersberg lives and works in New York City and Los Angeles.

Artists' Projects for the Web
Dia initiated a series of web-based works in early 1995, becoming one of the first arts organizations to foster the use of the world wide web as an artistic and conceptual medium. Dia's collection of web projects currently numbers twenty-three. Recent projects include Dorothy Cross's FOXGLOVE: digitalis purpurea (2005); Ana Torfs' Approximations/Contradictions (2004); Marijke van Warmerdam's And then the chimney smokes (2003); Glenn Ligon's Annotations (2003); Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied's Zombie and Mummy (2002); Jeanne Dunning's Tom Thumb: Notes Towards A Case History (2002); and James Buckhouse and Holly Brubach's Tap (2002); among others. All of the projects may be visited at Dia's website, www.diaart.org. Dia's Artists Projects for the Web are supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.

The next artwork in the series, a new project by Sarajevo-born and Paris-based artist Maja Bajevic, will launch on March 30, 2006. For her first web-based project, I Wish I was Born in a Hollywood Movie, Bajevic presents images and sounds she recorded while traveling in Mexico and elsewhere, exploring the intersection of the fictional histories of Hollywood movies and the reality of "bare life."

Dia Art Foundation
Dia Art Foundation was founded in 1974. A nonprofit institution, Dia is internationally renowned for initiating, supporting, presenting, and preserving art projects. Dia presents public programs and its permanent collection of works from the 1960s through the present at Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries, in Beacon, New York, within a 300,000 square-foot former printing facility on the Hudson River. Dia plans to relocate its acclaimed contemporary exhibition program in New York City to the future entrance to the High Line park in Lower Manhattan. The Foundation also maintains long-term, site-specific projects in the western United States, in New York City, and on Long Island.