56 Facts About Edward Ruscha

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

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

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

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

Edward 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.

Edward Ruscha is a lifelong friend of guitarist Mason Williams.

Edward 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.

Edward Ruscha has credited this artist's work as a source of inspiration for his change of interest from graphic arts to painting.

Edward 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.

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

In Norm's, La Cienega, on Fire, Burning Gas Station, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire, Edward Ruscha brought flames into play.

In 1966, Edward 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, Edward 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, Edward 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.

Later, words appeared on a photorealist mountain-range series which Edward Ruscha started producing in 1998.

From 1980, Edward 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.

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

In 1989, Edward 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.

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

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

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

Between 1962 and 1978, Edward Ruscha produced sixteen small artist's books:.

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

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

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

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

Interviews with Edward 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 Edward 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.

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

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

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

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

Edward 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.

Edward 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.

Edward 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.

Edward 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.

In 2004, The Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited a second Edward Ruscha drawing retrospective, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and then to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

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

In July 2012, Reading Ed Edward Ruscha opened at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria.

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

Ed Edward Ruscha: Road Tested, opened at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas in January 2011.

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

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

In 2003, Ed Edward 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, Edward 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.

The gift, purchased from Larry Gagosian, includes vintage photographs that Edward Ruscha took on a seven-month European tour in 1961.

Edward 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.

The muralist Kent Twitchell painted an 11,000-square-foot mural in Downtown Los Angeles to honor Edward Ruscha entitled the Ed Edward Ruscha Monument between 1978 and 1987.

The band Various Cruelties, based around Liam O'Donnell, was named after Edward Ruscha's painting of the same name of 1974.

Between 2006 and 2012, Edward 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, Edward Ruscha served on the board of Desert X; he resigned over the board's decision to collaborate on an exhibition in Saudi Arabia.

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

Edward Ruscha is married to Danica Edward Ruscha, nee Knego.

In 2013, the Harry Ransom Center acquired a Edward 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.

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