ED RUSCHA (b. 1937)

Edward Ruscha was born December 16, 1937 and is an American artist associated with the Pop art movement. He has worked in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, and film. Ruscha lives and works in Culver City, California. He 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. Ruscha's textual, flat paintings have been linked with both the Pop Art movement and the beat generation.

In 2004, The Whitney Museum of American Art organized two simultaneous exhibitions: Cotton Puffs, Q-tips®, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and then to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and Ed Ruscha and Photography. Also in 2004, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney mounted a selection of the artist's photographs, paintings, books and drawings that traveled to the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Rome and to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Another exhibition of Ruscha's photographs was organized for the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2006. Ruscha was the United States representative at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. In 2009, the Hayward Gallery, London mounted a retrospective of the artist’s paintings.