Ed Ruscha and the Great American West

The renowned artist Ed Ruscha was born in Nebraska, grew up in Oklahoma, and has lived and worked in Southern California since the late 1950s. Beginning in 1956, road trips across the American Southwest furnished a conceptual trove of themes and motifs that he mined throughout his career. The everyday landscapes of the West, especially as experienced from the automobile—gas stations, billboards, building facades, parking lots, and long stretches of roadway—are the primary motifs of his ofte...