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This year’s representative at the American Pavilion for the Venice Biennale, Edward Ruscha was born in Oklahoma in 1937. In 1956, he moved to Los Angeles to attend Chouinard Art Institute and the city has been his home and muse ever since.
Mr. Ruscha has shown his work internationally since the early 1960s. In 2000, a major retrospective, organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Miami Art Museum, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX. A retrospective of works on paper, organized by The Whitney Museum of American Art in 2004, traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. In 2001, Mr. Ruscha was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters as a member of the Department of Art. This October, Mr. Ruscha’s work will be featured in the upcoming reopening of the De Young Museum in San Francisco.
Mr. Ruscha is represented this evening by images of two of his works. Back of Hollywood, 1977, evokes Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locusts in its reveal of the unseen side of Hollywood. In this reverse view, the tenuous frailty and dimensionless quality of Hollywood glamour and fame is laid bare.
Words Over Miami, 1987, uses a quote from Hamlet as its source. Part of a series from a public art project commissioned by the Metro-Dade Art in Public Places Trust for a Phillip Johnson designed main library in Miami, murals and lunettes with this text float high above the readers and library visitors, serving as a springboard for thought while linking the visual, literary, and performing arts.
