Edward Ruscha (1937), Visual Artist

Edward Joseph Ruscha (born on December 16th, 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska) is an American Pop Artist working in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing and photography. Ruscha left Oklahoma for Los Angeles in 1956 to attend the Choinard Art Institue (today known as the California Institute of the Arts). Less than a decade later, he had published his first photography book, “Twentysix Gasoline Stations” (1963). Considered as one of the first Pop Art exhibitions in America, Ruscha was featured in the historically important and ground-breaking “New Painting of Common Objects” (1962) at the Pasadena Art Museum along with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and other pioneers of Pop Art. The seminal photography book “Every Building on the Sunset Strip” (1966) can be seen as an ancestor of Google’s Street View. His work has been present in many museum collections for thirty years. In October 2009, “Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting” opened at London’s Hayward Gallery, focusing exclusively on Ruscha’s canvases.