51 Facts About Ed Ruscha

Edward Joseph Ed Ruscha IV is an American artist associated with the pop art movement.

Ed Ruscha has worked in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, photography and film.

Ed Ruscha's works is often associated with the Pop Art movement.

Ed Ruscha was born into a Roman Catholic family in Omaha, Nebraska, with an older sister, Shelby, and a younger brother, Paul.

Ed Ruscha's mother was supportive of her son's early signs of artistic skill and interests.

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Young Ed Ruscha was attracted to cartooning and would sustain this interest throughout his adolescent years.

Ed Ruscha spent much of the summer of 1961 traveling through Europe.

Ed Ruscha worked as layout designer for Artforum magazine under the pseudonym “Eddie Russia” from 1965 to 1969 and taught at UCLA as a visiting professor for printing and drawing in 1969.

Ed Ruscha is a lifelong friend of guitarist Mason Williams.

Ed Ruscha achieved recognition for paintings incorporating words and phrases and for his many photographic books, all influenced by the deadpan irreverence of the Pop Art movement.

Ed Ruscha has credited these artists' work as sources of inspiration for his change of interest from graphic arts to painting.

Ed Ruscha's work is strongly influenced by the Hollywood film industry: the mountain in his Mountain Series is a play on the Paramount Pictures logo; Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights depicts the 20th Century Fox logo, while the dimensions of this work are reminiscent of a movie screen; in his painting The End these two words, which comprised the final shot in all black-and-white films, are surrounded by scratches and streaks reminiscent of damaged celluloid.

Ed Ruscha completed Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights in 1961, one year after graduating from college.

In 1966, Ed Ruscha reproduced Standard Station in a silkscreen print using a split-fountain printing technique, introducing a gradation of tone in the background of the print, with variations following in 1969 .

In 1985, Ed Ruscha begins a series of "City Lights" paintings, where grids of bright spots on dark grounds suggest aerial views of the city at night.

Since 1964, Ed Ruscha has been experimenting regularly with painting and drawing words and phrases, often oddly comic and satirical sayings alluding to popular culture and life in LA.

From 1980, Ed Ruscha started using an all-caps typeface of his own invention named ”Boy Scout Utility Modern” in which curved letter forms are squared-off This simple font is radically different from the style he used in works such as Honk .

Ed Ruscha has produced his word paintings with food products on moire and silks, since they were more stain-absorbent; paintings like A Blvd.

In 1985 Ed Ruscha was commissioned to design a series of fifty murals, WORDS WITHOUT THOUGHTS NEVER TO HEAVEN GO, for the rotunda of Miami–Dade Public Library in Florida, designed by architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee.

In 1989, Ed Ruscha decorated a pool for his brother Paul at his house in Studio City, Los Angeles, with a supersized luggage label: on a black tiled background are the words Name, Address and Phone, complete with dotted lines.

Ed Ruscha produced another site-specific piece, three 13-by-23-foot panels proclaiming Words In Their Best Order, for the offices of Gannett Company publishers in Tysons Corner, Virginia, in 2002.

In 2008, Ed Ruscha was among four text-based artists that were invited by the Whitechapel Gallery to write scripts to be performed by leading actors; Ed Ruscha's contribution was Public Notice .

Ed Ruscha is regularly commissioned with works for private persons, among them James Frey, Lauren Hutton, and Stella McCartney .

In 2020, Ed Ruscha produced the cover art and typography of Paul McCartney's album McCartney III.

In 1968, Ed Ruscha created the cover design for the catalogue accompanying a Billy Al Bengston exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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Ed Ruscha's photographs are straightforward, even deadpan, in their depiction of subjects that are not generally thought of as having aesthetic qualities.

Ed Ruscha re-worked the negatives of six of the images from his book Every Building on Sunset Strip.

Ed Ruscha was featured in Michael Blackwood's film documentary American Art in the Sixties.

Ed Ruscha appeared in L A Suggested by the Art of Edward Ruscha, a 1981 documentary by Gary Conklin shot at the artist's studio and desert home.

Interviews with Ed Ruscha are included in the documentaries Dennis Hopper: The Decisive Moments, Sketches of Frank Gehry, The Cool School, Iconoclasts, and How to Make a Book with Steidl, among others.

In 1962 Ed Ruscha's work was included, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Dowd, Phillip Hefferton, Joe Goode, Jim Dine, and Wayne Thiebaud, in the historically important and ground-breaking "New Painting of Common Objects, " curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum.

Ed Ruscha had his first solo exhibition in 1963 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles.

In 1966, Ed Ruscha was included in "Los Angeles Now" at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London, his first European exhibition.

Ed Ruscha joined the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1970 and had his first solo exhibition there in 1973.

In 1970 Ed Ruscha represented the United States at the Venice Biennale as part of a survey of American printmaking with an on-site workshop.

Ed Ruscha constructed Chocolate Room, a visual and sensory experience where the visitor saw 360 pieces of paper permeated with chocolate and hung like shingles on the gallery walls.

Ed Ruscha was the United States representative at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, showing the site- and occasion-specific a painting cycle Course of Empire.

Ed Ruscha was interviewed about the pavilion and its curation by Linda Norden and Donna De Salvo in Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World.

Ed Ruscha has been the subject of numerous museum retrospectives, beginning in 1983 with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1989, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2000, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in 2001.

Ed Ruscha coauthored the catalogue raisonne with Walker curator Siri Engberg.

In 2006, an exhibition of Ed Ruscha's photographs was organized for the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Kunsthaus Zurich, and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.

The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles prepared an exhibition with Ed Ruscha inspired by Jack Kerouac's On the Road, which opened in mid-2011 .

In 1956, Ed Ruscha drove from his home in Oklahoma to Los Angeles where he hoped to attend art school.

In 2003, Ed Ruscha curated "Emerson Woelffer: A Solo Flight", a survey of the work of the late Los Angeles-based Abstract Expressionist, for the inaugural exhibition of the Gallery at REDCAT .

In 2012, Ed Ruscha was invited to curate “The Ancients Stole All Our Great Ideas” at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the first exhibition in a series for which internationally renowned artists were invited to work with the national art and natural history collections.

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Ed Ruscha has small collections of books and lithographs in the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City, Utah and in Chateau de Montsoreau-Museum of Contemporary Art in Montsoreau, France.

Between 2006 and 2012, Ed Ruscha served on the board of trustees of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles where he had previously been included in eight special exhibits.

From 2015 until 2019, Ed Ruscha served on the board of Desert X; he resigned over the board's decision to collaborate on an exhibition in Saudi Arabia.

Ed Ruscha's Screaming in Spanish was installed in the entry hall of the residence of the United States Ambassador to Spain in Madrid.

In 2013, the Harry Ransom Center acquired a Ed Ruscha archive comprising five personal journals filled with preliminary sketches and notes; materials related to the making of his artist's book On The Road ; notes, photographs, correspondence and contact sheets relating to the creation and publication of his many other artist's books; and materials relating to his short films Miracle and Premium ; his portfolios; and several art commissions.

Ed Ruscha himself donated a substantial portion of the archive to the Ransom Center.