The Verbal & Visual Master:
I was sick all last week (ugh!) and couldn't hold my head up to read, so I kept the TV on for company. In all my channel surfing between AMC, TCM, BBC, and IFC, I also watched the Sundance Channel. One day there was an "Iconoclast" Season 4 segment showing fashion designer Stella McCartney paired with artist Ed Ruscha. It knocked me out! It was so great listening to Ruscha talk about art and catching up on what he is doing now.

Edward Ruscha's body of work is uniquely American in both subject and sensibility. Long regarded as an American master, Ed Ruscha has redefined the way we see the urban landscape, and, for that matter, the American landscape as a whole. Ruscha's intimacy with the essence of America, its free-spiritedness, is best expressed in his own words, "I like to think of myself as an ambling rambling person who doesn't have to concern himself with time: that's what we all dream about isn't it?"

Ruscha's glamorous "bad boy" persona and his Los Angeles County Museum retrospective were subjects for a 1983 People magazine profile in its May issue. In the article Henry Geldzahler is quoted as saying, "Conceptual, pop, surrealist, dada, neo-dada, earth art-all these are arguable elements of his style. Ruscha can be pinned down partially by any of these labels and yet he escapes all of them."

"His vision has touched America's soul through the beauty and boldness of his art, transforming city planning maps into sublime landscapes. I call on Ed Ruscha to reach out to Americans of every belief and move this good-hearted nation toward a culture of life. Ed's wonderfully idiosyncratic nature reflects the hard working people of America. Ed is a man of faith and a believer to the end. Ed Ruscha warns us that Los Angeles might be a mirage and California a myth -- a façade about to crumble into the desert, a set about to liquefy into the sea. Most families don't look to Hollywood for a source of values. The heart and soul of America is found in places like Oklahoma, where Ed grew up," commented President George W. Bush in January 2005 upon the occasion of naming Ed Ruscha as Secretary of the United States Department of Art & Technology, to lead his ambitious agenda for cultural reform.

Whitney Museum Director Adam D. Weinberg describes Ruscha as having "a singular vision of America, he forces us to examine impassive iconography and the landscape of the ordinary, compelling us to look anew at the astonishing strangeness of the world."