Artist's Biography

Edward Ruscha attended the Chouinard Art Institute in 1956, and had his first solo exhibition in 1963 at the Ferus Gallery. In 1973, Ruscha began showing his work with Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. He continues to live and work in Los Angeles, and currently shows with Gagosian Gallery. Ruscha has consistently combined the cityscape of his adopted hometown with vernacular language to communicate a particular urban experience. Encompassing painting, drawing, photography, and artist's books, Ruscha's work holds a mirror up to the banality of urban life and gives order to the barrage of mass media-fed images and information that confronts us daily. Ruscha's early career as a graphic artist continues to strongly influence his aesthetic and thematic approach.

Ruscha has been the subject of numerous museum retrospectives that have traveled internationally, including those organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1982, the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1989, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2000, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in 2002, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2004. Also 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 the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and Ed Ruscha and Photography. In 2005, Ruscha was the United States representative at the 51st Venice Biennale. The traveling exhibition Ed Ruscha, Photographer opened at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2006. The major retrospective, "Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting," opened at the Hayward Gallery in London in October 2009 and traveled to the Haus der Kunst, Munich and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Curator's Biography

Marc Pally is an artist and curator/administrator specializing in public art. He received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Pally’s artwork may be found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Orange County Museum of Art; and the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art among others. Pally taught studio art for many years at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California; served as the Director of LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions); and was City Planner for Public Art at the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles. The latter position began Pally's career in the field of public art, where he has become a nationally-recognized leader for the development and management of public art projects, primarily in the private sector. Pally currently serves as Artistic Director of Glow, a biannual dusk and beyond art event on the beach in Santa Monica, California. His passion and commitment is to engage the vision of artists in the public realm thereby helping to create environments in which the unexpected and often the enigmatic reside as key elements in our common spaces.