Design
Looking at Ed Ruscha, Quintessential Artist of Southern California
A short film probes the painter’s love of streamlined architecture, bold signs, and cinematic narrative.
Pop art icon Ed Ruscha was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1937, but Los Angeles has always been his artistic home. For more than 60 years, the artist has made paintings, photographs, and prints that play with visual tropes of the Southern California metropolis—the ticky-tacky modernism, the raging fires, the cinematic vistas and constructed plots. “Ed Ruscha: Buildings and Words,” a short film directed by Felipe Lima and commissioned by L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, probes friends, painters, actors, gallerists, and Ruscha himself for insights into how his adopted home shaped a lifetime of work.