News / Ed Ruscha / Museum Exhibitions

On View

ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN

Through January 13, 2024
Museum of Modern Art, New York
www.moma.org

Spanning sixty-five years of Ed Ruscha’s remarkable career and mirroring his own cross-disciplinary approach, the exhibition features over 250 works, produced between 1958 and the present. Including painting, drawing, prints, film, photography, artist’s books, and installation, the works are displayed according to a loose chronology throughout the sixth-floor galleries of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Alongside the artist’s most acclaimed works, the exhibition highlights lesser-known aspects of his practice, offering new perspectives and underlining Ruscha’s role as a keen observer of our rapidly changing world.

Closed

13 Women

October 8, 2022–August 27, 2023
Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California
ocma.art

13 Women marks the Orange County Museum of Art’s sixtieth anniversary; by paying homage to the thirteen women who founded the Balboa Pavilion Gallery, the OCMA’s predecessor institution, which was opened in 1962. The exhibition presents work from the 1960s to the present by the artists central to the museum’s collection, including Chris Burden and Ed Ruscha.

Closed

Strike Fast, Dance Lightly
Artists on Boxing

June 16–August 11, 2023
FLAG Art Foundation, New York
www.flagartfoundation.org

Copresented with The Church, Sag Harbor, New York, Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: Artists on Boxing, is a two-venue group exhibition that centers on the psychology, ethos, and spectacle of boxing. It explores the sport as both theme and metaphor, together with its complex and multifaceted cultural meanings. The exhibition includes ancient, modern, and contemporary artworks, as well as newly commissioned pieces and boxing-related ephemera. Work by Amoako Boafo and Ed Ruscha is included.

Closed

Motion
Autos, Art, Architecture

April 8–September 18, 2022
Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain
www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus

Motion. Autos, Art, Architecture celebrates the artistic dimension of the automobile and links it to the parallel worlds of painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, and film. The exhibition brings together nearly forty automobiles that are placed center stage in the galleries and surrounded by significant works of art and architecture. Work by Alexander Calder, Christo, Andreas Gursky,  Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol is included.

Closed

America. Entre rêves et réalités
La collection du Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Collection

June 9–September 11, 2022
Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Canada
www.mnbaq.org

Featuring more than a hundred paintings, photographs, sculptures, and video works drawn from the permanent collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, this exhibition, whose title translates to America. Between Dreams and Realities, offers a broad overview of modern and contemporary American art. Organized thematically, it looks carefully and critically at the notion of the American dream and uncovers how artists have variously grappled with questions of identity, the challenges of globalization, the realities of everyday life in America, and the complexities of its technological and political revolutions. Work by Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Sally Mann, Man Ray, Brice Marden, Nam June Paik, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, and Mary Weatherford is included.

Closed

On the Edge
Los Angeles Art, 1970s–1990s, from the Joan and Jack Quinn Family Collection

September 30, 2021–April 2, 2022
Bakersfield Museum of Art, California
www.bmoa.org

This exhibition highlights 150 works from the collection of Joan and Jack Quinn, which was primarily amassed between the 1970s and the 1990s. Many of their holdings were collected directly from the artists and have never changed hands or been shown publicly. The artworks they were drawn to are defined by a spirit of nonconformity, a play of new materials, a celebration of light, and the “California cool” ethos. Work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Frank Gehry, and Ed Ruscha is included.

Closed

Artists Inspired by Music
Interscope Reimagined

January 30–February 13, 2022
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
www.lacma.org

To mark the thirtieth anniversary of Interscope Records, the company invited artists to select albums and songs from Interscope’s groundbreaking catalogue and fostered exchanges between artists and musicians to generate resonant pairings. The exhibition, which includes more than fifty works, brings an intergenerational group of visual artists into dialogue with iconic musicians from the last three decades, providing a fresh perspective on influential music for the present moment. Work by John Currin, Jennifer Guidi, Damien Hirst, Titus Kaphar, Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, and Anna Weyant is included.

Closed

Hey! Did you know that art does not exist…

July 27, 2021–January 8, 2022
Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel
www.tamuseum.org.il

This exhibition presents more than one hundred works from Sylvio Perlstein’s intensely personal collection, which traces artists and trends that have defined the avant-garde, complex, and experimental nature of twentieth-century art. Work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Duane Hanson, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Brice Marden, Ed Ruscha, Rudolf Stingel, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol is included.

Closed

Ed Ruscha

November 1, 2018–December 31, 2021
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

Portals

June 11–December 31, 2021
NEON, Athens
neon.org.gr

Portals brings together fifty-nine artists from twenty-seven countries in the newly renovated spaces of the former Public Tobacco Factory, now the Hellenic Parliament Library and Printing House. Inspired by writer Arundhati Roy’s conception of the COVID-19 pandemic as a “portal, a gateway between one world and the next,” the exhibition aims to investigate the new reality revealed through the prism of change and disruption. Work by Ed Ruscha and Adriana Varejão is included.

Closed

Face à Arcimboldo

May 29–November 22, 2021
Centre Pompidou-Metz, France
www.centrepompidou-metz.fr

This exhibition, whose title translates to Arcimboldo Face to Face, invites visitors to explore the timeless vocabulary of the sixteenth-century painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo (c. 1527–1593). The show demonstrates how his work has influenced art history for more than four centuries through the work of 130 artists, including work by Francis Bacon, Glenn Brown, Alex Israel, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Rodin, and Ed Ruscha.

Closed

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.

Closed

Ed Ruscha
OKLA

February 18–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.

Closed

00s. Collection Cranford
Les années 2000

October 24, 2020–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.

Closed

Ed Ruscha
Travel Log

September 30, 2020–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.

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, University of Texas at Austin
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 Harold Ancart, 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.