As a member of Collaborative Projects, she also participated in the illegal occupation of an abandoned city-owned building for the groundbreaking The Real Estate Show and also The Times Square Show.[5] She also participated in the explosion of late-1970s artist generated activity which included Group Material,[6] Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America,[7] (a nationwide mobilization of writers, artists, activists, artists organizations, and solidarity groups that began in New York in 1983), P.A.D.D.( Political Artists Documentation and Distribution), Artmakers, Ventana ( a collective of artists in Support of the Artists threatened by US aggression in the Contra wars of the 1980s in Central America). Her work appeared in early publications of The Soho News, East Village Eye, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics,[8][9][10]World War 3 Illustrated[11]
The first publicly visible work was "The Rat Patrol," which was an outdoor poster project of a life-size rat pasted where garbage accumulated, pointing out the fact the city is a living ecosystem with a delicate balance. Art critic Douglas Crimp reflected on this work by writing, "Surely a photograph of a rat borrowed from Health Department files and mechanically reproduced is not a creation of artistic imagination; it has no claim to universality; it would be unthinkable to see the picture on exhibition in a museum."[12]
Mid-career and recent work
In the mid-1980s, Rupp turned her attention to global ecological struggles, such as agribusiness and water contamination. One example being the Watershed Glassware, a set of glasses for drinking tap water, featuring printed images of "perfectly harmless" organisms like Giardia, Cryptosporidium, and Fluoride. She began to make public art works including Social Progress, a commission for the Public Art Fund. Recent works include sculptures of fake ivory and its association with commercial arms trade and oil extraction. In a statement, the artist explains that her work is less about animals than it is concerned with our attitudes towards habitat. Other recent works include the series "Extinct Birds Previously Consumed by Humans (From the Brink of Extinction to the Supermarket)," that was shown at the Museum of Art and Design's exhibition, Dead or Alive.[13]
"Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change," Lucy Lippard, E.P. Dutton, 1984. ISBN0525480374 Publisher: E. P. Dutton, 1984
"ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Art Gallery," Alan Moore and Marc Miller, ABC No Rio with Collaborative Projects, 1985
"Committed to print: social and political themes in recent American printed art," Deborah Wye, The Museum of Modern Art, 1988
"Democracy: A project of Group Material," Dia Art Foundation: Discussions in Contemporary Art Number 5, Bay Press/Dia Art Foundation, 1990.“Artworks: Christy Rupp,” Williams College Museum of Art, 1991
"The Artist Project Portraits of the Real Art World C: New York Artists 1981-1990," Peter Bellamy, IN Publishing, 1991
“Natural Selection- The work of Christy Rupp,” Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY, essay Lucy Lippard, 1992
"Signs Of Life: Kiki Smith, Rebecca Howland, Cara Perlman & Christy Rupp," University Galleries of Illinois State University, March 2, 1993
"Mixed Use Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, 1970s to the Present," edited by Lynne Cooke and Douglas Crimp for the Reina Sofia in Madrid. Co-published by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and MIT Press, 2010
"Trespass: A History Of Uncommissioned Urban Art," Carlo McCormick, Taschen, 2010
"This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s," Helen Molesworth, Published by MCA Chicago in association with Yale University Press, 2012
"American Dreamers: Reality and Imagination in Contemporary American Art," Bartholmew Bland, Franziska Nori, The Center for Contemporary Strozzina, Florence, 2012
"On the Museum’s Ruins," by Douglas Crimp, V-A-C Foundation, Moscow, Russia, figure 55, p. 242, 2014
"Talk About Street Art," Jerome Catz, Flammarion, 2014
"Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West," Lucy Lippard, The New Press, 2014
"A Book About Colab" Edited by Max Schumann, Printed Matter, 2016
"Exit Art: Unfinished Memories: 30 Years of Exit Art," Susan Harris (Editor), Mary Staniszewski (Editor, Foreword), Papo Colo (Preface), Holland Cotter (Foreword), Steidl, 2016
Lippard, Lucy R. “Sex and Death and Shock and Schlock: A Long Review of ‘The Times Square Show’ by Anne Ominous.” Post-modern Perspectives: Issues in Contemporary Art. Ed. Howard Risatti. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1990. 77-86.
Sedgwick, Susana. “Times Square Show.” East Village Eye Summer 1980: 21.
Whiting, Cécile. A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.