News / Ed Ruscha / Museum Exhibitions

On View

00s. Collection Cranford
Les années 2000

Through May 30, 2021
Mo.Co. Contemporary, Montpellier, France
www.moco.art

This exhibition of work from the Cranford Collection, established by Muriel and Freddy Salem in 1999, aims to define the identity of the 2000s by creating a dialogue between one hundred artworks by a multigenerational array of artists who contributed to shaping the beginning of the millennium. Work by Glenn Brown, Damien Hirst, Mike Kelley, Albert Oehlen, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Franz West, and Christopher Wool is included.

On View

Ed Ruscha
Travel Log

Through May 30, 2021
Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Sonoma, California
svma.org

This exhibition by Ed Ruscha includes rarely seen black-and-white photographs documenting the artist’s frequent trips from Los Angeles to Oklahoma in the 1960s, which reveal inspirations for his iconic prints and paintings, including images of gas stations, diners, and the streets of rural towns like Gallup, New Mexico, and Winslow, Arizona. Also featured are examples of his well-known word prints, including color lithographs that combine visual formality with playful language.

On View

Ed Ruscha
OKLA

Through July 5, 2021
Oklahoma Contemporary, Oklahoma City
oklahomacontemporary.org

Over the past six decades, Ed Ruscha has produced a diverse and highly influential body of work encompassing paintings, drawings, prints, books, photographs, and films. OKLA focuses on the artist’s Oklahoma roots—his family, his upbringing, and his discovery of his calling as an artist. It is also, remarkably, his first solo museum exhibition in his home state. Ruscha lived in Oklahoma City from the ages of five to eighteen—a formative period in both his life and his artistic sensibility. His Midwestern childhood had a profound impact on his art, which the exhibition explores through around seventy-five works from all phases of his career.

On View

Ed Ruscha
Artist Rooms

Through July 18, 2021
Tate Modern, London
www.tate.org.uk

This display reflects the range of Ed Ruscha’s practice, including paintings, prints, and photographic books, through artworks spanning sixty years of the artist’s career. Full of irony and humor, his works can often be interpreted as commentaries on American society.

On View

Ed Ruscha

Opened November 1, 2018
The Broad, Los Angeles
www.thebroad.org

An installation of sixteen works by Ed Ruscha is presented at the Broad. The museum is temporarily closed due to the ongoing health crisis. 

Closed

Edward Hopper and the American Hotel

July 17–October 25, 2020
Newfields, Indianapolis
discovernewfields.org

Edward Hopper and the American Hotel explores the artist’s images of hospitality settings showcasing more than sixty of the artist’s paintings, drawings, watercolors, and illustrations. Also included are thirty-five works by American artists that similarly explore the visual culture of hotels, travel, and mobility from the early twentieth century to the present, including work by Gregory Crewdson, Ed Ruscha, and Cindy Sherman. This show has traveled from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia.

Closed

Ed Ruscha
Drum Skins

January 11–October 4, 2020
Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas
blantonmuseum.org

This show features more than a dozen new works by Ed Ruscha painted on found drum heads. Ruscha sourced the paintings’ visual iconography and language from the American vernacular.

Closed

Edward Hopper and the American Hotel

October 26, 2019–February 23, 2020
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
www.vmfa.museum

Edward Hopper and the American Hotel explores the artist’s images of hospitality settings showcasing more than sixty of the artist’s paintings, drawings, watercolors, and illustrations. Also included are thirty-five works by American artists that similarly explore the visual culture of hotels, travel, and mobility from the early twentieth century to the present, including work by Gregory Crewdson, Ed Ruscha, and Cindy Sherman.

Closed

The Foundation of the Museum
MOCA’s Collection

May 19, 2019–January 20, 2020
Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles
www.moca.org

To mark the museum’s fortieth anniversary, this exhibition presents a selected topography of artworks that speak to the diversity of MOCA’s collecting over the past four decades. With special emphasis on works associated with the museum’s remarkable history of exhibitions, The Foundation of the Museum: MOCA’s Collection shows the institution’s holdings as shaped by a changing landscape of developments in contemporary art and curatorial focus, as well by as the social and cultural backdrops that inform them. Work by Chris Burden, Mike Kelley, Bruce Nauman, Albert Oehlen, Nancy Rubins, and Ed Ruscha is included.

Closed

Ed Ruscha in
Life Is a Highway: Art and American Car Culture

June 15–September 15, 2019
Toledo Museum, Ohio
www.toledomuseum.org

Life Is a Highway brings together a diverse selection of artists to showcase how the automobile reshaped the twentieth-century American landscape and cultural attitudes of self-expression. Work by Ed Ruscha is included.

Closed

Unsettled

October 27, 2018–April 30, 2019
Palm Springs Art Museum, California
www.psmuseum.org

Unsettled, cocurated by JoAnne Northrup and Ed Ruscha, amasses two hundred artworks by eighty artists spanning two thousand years to explore the geography of frontiers characterized by vast expanses of open land, rich natural resources, diverse indigenous peoples, colonialism, and the ongoing conflicts that inevitably arise when these factors coexist. This exhibition originated at the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno. Work by Chris Burden and Ed Ruscha is included.

Closed

Peindre la nuit

October 13, 2018–April 15, 2019
Centre Pompidou-Metz, France
www.centrepompidou-metz.fr

This exhibition explores the night in modern and contemporary painting, music, literature, photography, and video. With a focus on the perception of night rather than its iconography, the exhibition intends to be a nocturnal experience. Work by Francis Bacon, Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, and Ed Ruscha is included. 

Closed

A Journey That Wasn’t

June 30, 2018–February 10, 2019
The Broad, Los Angeles
www.thebroad.org

This exhibition explores complex representations of time and its passage. The show includes more than fifty works drawn from the museum’s collection of postwar and contemporary art and features more than twenty artists, including Richard Artschwager, Gregory Crewdson, Andreas Gursky, Anselm Kiefer, and Ed Ruscha.

Closed

West by Midwest

November 17, 2018–January 27, 2019
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
mcachicago.org

West by Midwest tells a story that illuminates the ways that contemporary art practices spread and develop by tracing the intersecting lives of artists who have migrated from the American Midwest to the West Coast since the mid-twentieth century. Lured by career opportunities, warmer weather, and the prospect of a better life promised by the postwar boom, those artists who were able to migrate attended art schools together, shared studios, exhibited work in the same galleries, collaborated on projects, engaged in activism, and dated one another. Work by Mike Kelley, Bruce Nauman, Sterling Ruby, and Ed Ruscha is included.

Closed

Ed Ruscha
Double Americanisms

November 16, 2018–January 20, 2019
Secession, Vienna
www.secession.at

An installation of works by Ed Ruscha that source visual iconography and language from the American vernacular is on view at the Secession in Vienna.

Closed

Ed Ruscha
Archaeology and Romance

August 11, 2018–January 6, 2019
Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin
www.hrc.utexas.edu

This exhibition features more than 150 objects and presents Ed Ruscha’s celebrated books, photographs, drawings, and prints alongside unpublished archival production materials, layout sketches, and studio notebooks. The exhibition also examines the stages of conception, design, and production leading to the publication of his groundbreaking artist’s books, and provides audiences with an unprecedented look into Ruscha’s creative process.

Closed

Ed Ruscha
Very

September 14, 2018–January 6, 2019
KODE Art Museums and Composer Homes, Bergen, Norway
kodebergen.no

With works from the UBS Art Collection as a basis, this exhibition covers the artist’s production from the 1960s onward, focusing on the technically and graphically innovative approaches that Ed Ruscha has made use of over the years. Studies from his most iconic paintings and artist’s books are also on display. This show has traveled from the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark.

Closed

Picture Fiction
Kenneth Josephson and Contemporary Photography

April 28–December 30, 2018
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
mcachicago.org

Picture Fiction considered the conceptual photography of Kenneth Josephson. In addition to presenting four major series made by the Chicago-based artist roughly between 1960 and 1980, the exhibition highlighted links between Josephson and other contemporary artists working in photography, film, and sculpture, including Roe Ethridge, Ed Ruscha, and Jeff Wall.

Closed

Sea of Desire

June 2–November 4, 2018
Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles, France
www.fondationcarmignac.com

The phrase “Sea of Desire” on a large-scale painting by Ed Ruscha welcomes visitors to this exhibition, which channels a spirit of rebellion and change. Sea of Desire confronts the viewer with compelling artworks that imply revolution, freedom, and a quest for beauty. Work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol is included.

Closed

Ed Ruscha
Course of Empire

June 11–October 7, 2018
National Gallery, London
www.nationalgallery.org.uk

In Course of Empire, the audience will encounter Ed Ruscha’s modern take on the cyclical nature of civilization, evocative of Thomas Cole’s series of the same name concurrently on display. In contrast to Cole’s work, which evokes that artist’s grandiose vision of the rise and fall of a classical civilization, Ruscha’s Course of Empire focuses on the industrial buildings of Los Angeles—simple, utilitarian, boxlike structures with no pretension to beauty, but redolent of economic might and global reach.

Closed

Unsettled

April 20–September 9, 2018
Anchorage Museum, Alaska
www.anchoragemuseum.org

Unsettled, co-curated by JoAnne Northrup and Ed Ruscha, amasses two hundred artworks by eighty artists spanning two thousand years to explore the geography of frontiers characterized by vast expanses of open land, rich natural resources, diverse indigenous peoples, colonialism, and the ongoing conflicts that inevitably arise when these factors coexist. This exhibition traveled from the Nevada Museum of Art. Work by Chris Burden and Ed Ruscha is included.

Closed

Ed Ruscha
Very

May 17–August 19, 2018
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark
en.louisiana.dk

With works from the UBS Art Collection as a basis, the exhibition covers the artist’s production from the 1960s onward, focusing on the technically and graphically innovative approaches that Ed Ruscha has made use of over the years. Studies from his most iconic paintings and artist’s books are also on display.

Closed

Word/Play
Prints, Photographs, and Paintings by Ed Ruscha

February 3–May 6, 2018
Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska
www.joslyn.org

Word/Play is Ruscha’s first major exhibition in the state of Nebraska, where he was born, and brings together prints, photographs, and artist’s books dating from the 1960s through 2014, all of which accompanies a selection of major paintings.

Closed

Unsettled

August 26, 2017–January 21, 2018
Nevada Museum of Art, Reno
www.nevadaart.org

Unsettled, co-curated by JoAnne Northrup and Ed Ruscha, amasses two hundred artworks by eighty artists spanning two thousand years to explore the geography of frontiers characterized by vast expanses of open land, rich natural resources, diverse indigenous peoples, colonialism, and the ongoing conflicts that inevitably arise when these factors coexist. Work by Chris Burden and Ed Ruscha is included.