Edward Ruscha

Edward Ruscha was raised in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Following his graduation from high school in 1956, Ruscha moved to Los Angeles to attend the Chouinard Art Institute. The first solo exhibition of his work was in 1963 at the pioneering Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Over the past forty-five years, Ruscha’s art has been the subject of many exhibitions, including Course of Empire at the United States Pavilion of the 51st Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy, in 2005 and at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2006; Edward Ruscha (2000), a retrospective exhibition organized jointly by the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England; I Don’t Want No Retrospective—the Works of Edward Ruscha (1982) organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Edward Ruscha (Ed-werd Rew-shay) Young Artist (1972) at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minnesota. Ruscha’s work has also been featured in hundreds of group exhibitions around the world since 1960. His public commissions include Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go (1985) and a group of lunette murals (1987–89) for the Miami-Dade Public Library in Miami, another set of murals for the Denver Central Library in Colorado (1995), and Picture Without Words (1998) for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.