Sonoma art museum reopens with exhibition on pop artist Ed Ruscha

The Sonoma Valley Museum of Art reopens to the public with a bang today, April 1, featuring a landmark exhibition of the work of pop artist Ed Ruscha.

The “Ed Ruscha: Travel Log” exhibit includes lithographs, photographs and art books, such as an illustrated manuscript of Beat writer Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”

The museum has been reopening gradually, in line with Sonoma County’s move out of the most restrictive tier, purple, of the state community reopening plan as the coronavirus eases. Museum members were allowed in last week, when the county was in the red tier, which allows museums to have in-person indoor visitors at 25% of their total capacity.

“I can’t wait to welcome people back; it’s very exciting,” SVMA’s Executive Director Linda Keaton said just minutes before the doors opened to museum members last week.

The museum has enacted measures to enhance safety, such as limiting capacity to 19 visitors, requiring masks and eliminating touch surfaces.

“It’s great,” said Susan Bundschu of Sonoma, one of the first members to revisit the museum. “I’ve had both COVID shots, and it’s like a warehouse here, so I’m not worried. Art is important.”

“We’ve been waiting nearly a year to share the museum with our audience,” Keaton said. SVMA shut down in March 2020 and reopened briefly last July before closing again for almost nine months.

Admission will be free through April, Keaton said. “That’s just our way of thanking people for sticking with us.”

Extended run

After nearly four years of planning, SVMA’s Ruscha show was scheduled to open last September and close last January, Keaton said. But it was postponed due to the pandemic.

Keaton asked collectors to extend loans of Ruscha’s artworks, “and everybody was so understanding,” she said. For some of the private collectors, that meant “(blank spaces) on their walls.”

Ruscha is known for his “word paintings” in which text floats spectrally atop landscapes. One color lithograph in the Sonoma show has the words “WALL ROCKET” over a dramatic mountain background; another says “JET BABY.”

Photographs include black-and-white images from one of Ruscha’s early road trips from his home in Oklahoma along Route 66 to Los Angeles.

On that trek, Ruscha made images of gas stations. A Standard station in New Mexico became the model for one of his best-known compositions, “Double Standard.”

Ruscha (pronounced Ru-shay) is 83 and lives and works in Los Angeles, as he has for more than 60 years.

“He’s a very influential artist,” Keaton said, “and you can’t deny his sense of humor. Often art is lacking in a sense of humor, so I find his work very refreshing and relatable. There’s something very clean and crisp about it.”

In a 2018 Vanity Fair profile, Mark Rozzo wrote that Ruscha “is to highways, service stations and signage what Warhol was to soup cans.”

Rozzo called Ruscha the “godfather” of the pop and conceptual art movements, yet like many great artists, he defies labels.

Ruscha has experimented with a huge range of mediums in his work. In lieu of paint, he has used squid ink, ketchup, chewing tobacco, even axle grease.

Among the pieces in “Travel Log” are “Rusty Signs,” four works made of paper that look like corroded metal.

Each of these pieces has a short phase: one says “CASH FOR TOOLS” while another says “DEAD END” and is riddled with what appear to be bullet holes, just as a sign on a deserted highway would be.

Part of SVMA’s exhibition is a 7-minute video, narrated by actor and Ruscha collector Owen Wilson, about the artist’s life and interests.

The road west

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Ruscha grew up in Oklahoma and headed west after high school.

He trained his lens on ordinary places, documenting his journey with photographs of gas stations, including one in Texas where the price for a gallon of regular was 21.9 cents.

Ruscha’s road trips have been called part “Grapes of Wrath,” part “On the Road.”

In 1960, he graduated from L.A.’s Chouinard Art Institute, but he didn’t expect to make a living in fine art. He planned to work as a sign painter.

His first word paintings were known as “one-word knockouts,” such as “OOF,” with the exclamation in yellow letters on a royal blue background. These works reflect his early love of comic books and cartoons.

Often asked about the role of text in his art, Ruscha has said words have “temperatures.” Boy Scout Utility Modern is what he calls the assertive, all-caps font he created.

In the video playing in the SVMA exhibition, Ruscha describes his font, saying: “It looks like it was done by a lineman for the telephone company, and he’s asked to make a poster for the annual picnic.”

The artist was a pioneer of collectible art books, and perhaps his best-known is “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” from 1966, in which Ruscha included every building on the famous Los Angeles strip. It opens accordion-like into a 27-foot-long strip.

He and his brother used a motorized Nikon camera to shoot each building as they drove along Sunset Boulevard, four decades before Google Maps began assembling street views.

Ruscha then collated the black-and-white images in the book, which is on display in SVMA’s show.

An early Ruscha collector was actor Dennis Hopper, who began buying his work in the mid-1960s.

Among Ruscha’s fans are Barack and Michelle Obama, who borrowed one of his works from the National Gallery of Art and hung it in the White House.

That piece is called “I Think I’ll …” and its theme is indecision, making it a bold choice for the White House.

In a corridor at the Sonoma show is a set of paintings of L.A.’s iconic Hollywood sign in various states of decay.

That illustrates another Ruscha theme: everything is in flux, nothing is static. And even mundane and overlooked places are worthy of attention.

Michael Shapiro writes about art, performance and travel.