awards for arts achievement

Born in Omaha, Ed Ruscha moved to Los Angeles in 1956 to attend the Chouinard Art Institute and has made the city his home ever since. 

Mr. Ruscha has consistently combined the cityscape of Los Angeles with vernacular language to communicate a particularly urban experience.  Encompassing photography, drawing, painting and artist books, his work holds the mirror up to the banality of urban life and gives order to the barrage of mass media-fed images and information that confront us daily.  His early career as a graphic artist continues to strongly influence his aesthetic and thematic approach.  In 1968, Ruscha (under the pseudonym Eddie Russia) designed Artforum magazine, and the design still endures today.

Mr. Ruscha has been the subject of numerous museum retrospectives, which have traveled worldwide, beginning in 1983 with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1989, The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2000.  In 2001, he was elected to the American  Academy of Arts and Letters.  The following year a major exhibition of his entire body of work opened in Spain at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.

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, DC 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 his photographs was organized for the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2006.  Mr. Ruscha was the United States representative at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005.  His latest exhibition, Ed Ruscha: 50 Years of Painting opened on October 14, 2009 at The Hayward Gallery in London.

Mr. Ruscha had his first solo exhibition in 1963 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles.  At the start of the '70s, Mr. Ruscha began showing his work with the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York.  He currently shows with the Gagosian Gallery in New York, Beverly Hills, and London.  Mr. Ruscha's work was featured at the 2005 National Arts Awards.