Public Market, 2006 Ed Ruscha was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1937. At the age of 18 he moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in the late 1950s. He has lived there ever since. In 2004, following his exhibition that year at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., critic Peter Scheldahl called Ruscha “one of the four most influential artists to have emerged in the nineteen-sixties.”
“When I began painting, all my paintings were of words which were guttural utterances like Smash, Boss, Eat,” Ruscha has said. “Those words were like flowers in a vase; I just happened to paint words like someone else paints flowers. It wasn’t until later that I was interested in combinations of words and making thoughts, sentences, and things like that.” Ruscha’s word works stand on their own as compelling intersections between art and poetry.
L.A.S.F.#3, 2003 Intersections are important for Ruscha in more ways than one. His paintings, drawings and photographs of intersections and other Southern California cityscapes (gas stations and freeways, signs and logos, palm trees and swimming pools) have fundamentally changed American landscape art.
At Crown Point Press in 2001, he made a portfolio of prints called Los Francisco San Angeles. Each of the seven etchings in the portfolio shows street intersections from San Francisco and LA juxtaposed one over the other. In 2003, he came back to do a larger version of the small portfolio. “The power of Ruscha’s style is at its most emblematic in these three large soft ground etchings,” Kathan Brown wrote in that exhibition’s Overview. “Their ease and simple clarity belies the odd way they have of bringing us back again and again to ponder them and smile.” In this project, Ruscha’s California landscape is beyond city borders. These prints are like inside jokes: his words are often simple, elements of the California culture’s shared vocabulary, like street names, cliches, or snippets of conversation, but in an unfamiliar context where they stand on their own, they communicate in what Brown calls “jargon-free, matter-of-fact, but enigmatic thinking.” His distinctive language continues to present strange new possibilities for meaning.