STATION TO STATION
THE DISTANCE from the Knox-Less service station in Oklahoma City to Bob’s Seaside Service, not so far from the Santa Monica Pier at the terminus of Route 66—both pictured in Ed Ruscha’s 1963 artist’s book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations—was about 1,400 miles. It’s a drive Ruscha has taken many times since he traveled it with Mason Williams in Ruscha’s lowered 1950 four-door Ford, with throaty Smitty Glasspack dual muffler, following their graduation from Oklahoma City’s Classen High School in 1956.1
The trail from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles via Route 66 holds a mythic place within the lore of the American West, from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road—typed in 1951 and published in September 1957, a full year after Ruscha and Williams’s journey—to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), in which the author framed the trip from Oklahoma to California as one driven by drought and depression.
But Ruscha’s drive straight out of high school was born of neither wanderlust nor economic anxiety; rather, it was spurred by a desire for new prospects beyond the limitations of Oklahoma City. Los Angeles offered the possibility of an education in graphic design and new adventures in a city experiencing a rapid evolution in the advertising, film, television, and technology sectors. In turn, the booming growth of the middle and upper classes had the capacity to sustain—albeit marginally—art galleries, which afforded scrappy young artists opportunities and odd jobs to make ends meet. In Ruscha’s telling,
As I came out to California, I knew that I had to have some of my artwork, so I packed up a portfolio and I tried to get into Art Center because that was commercial art to me, and that was the thing I wanted to be. I wanted to be a commercial artist. . . . In the Saturday Evening Post, there was a story about Art Center School which my dad read, so he encouraged me to go to that school for that reason. I got out here and found out I couldn’t get in, you know, there’s no opening. So, I went to Chouinard and started to go to school there. Now that was the Bohemian school.2
Those early years of Ruscha’s education and his initial projects—artistic, commercial, and personal—presented signposts pointing toward the artist’s future work.
In 1956, Art Center was a clean-cut, white-collar “straight” school best known for its automotive, advertising, and industrial-design departments and still teeming with students on the GI Bill. At Art Center, “you couldn’t have facial hair—no moustaches, no beards—short pants . . . or bring bongo drums to school,”3 but only a few miles away, at the definitively West Coast countercultural Chouinard Art Institute, such attire was not only allowed, it was practically encouraged. “You could wear rags to school and get away with it and still have a good time. And I fell into a class which was actually advertising design by a guy named Bud Coleman. And he right off started going into the history of books in book design. We did field trips to places like the Clark Library downtown. And I sort of got awakened by book design, and the history of book design. And that’s always kinda stayed with me.”4
Coleman told Ruscha about Los Angeles printers that were producing fine-art books, including Plantin Press, a small private printer and publisher owned by Saul and Lillian Marks that had been founded in 1931.5 The Markses briefly hired Ruscha in 1958 and taught him typesetting for letterpress and the basics of book construction, fortifying the young artist’s growing knowledge of classical page design. “I worked for him for maybe six months or so . . . and I started learning and being interested in typography and I kind of built up this desire to make some books.”6
Ruscha’s penchant was to overtly maximize content within clearly demarcated spaces such as those defined by the edges of a sheet of paper, the lip of a canvas, an advertising block, covers of books, and the clean interior pages of artists’ publications.
In contrast with the elegant but stolidly traditional Plantin Press layouts, Ruscha’s earliest printed-graphic energies hewed closer to those of Wallace Berman’s generation-defining beat-culture periodical Semina,7 which included poetry, graphic arts, and photography by Charles Brittin, Cameron, Allen Ginsberg, David Meltzer, and Michael McClure, as well as translations of European poets such as Herman Hesse, Charles Baudelaire, Jean Cocteau, and Paul Éluard. At the time, Ruscha additionally made note of books such as Robert Lebel’s sophisticated Marcel Duchamp monograph,8 designed by Duchamp with Arnold Fawcus. These two publications both toyed with and refuted fine-press conventions by adding elements of chance operation’s ordered disorder.
Ruscha’s avant-garde proclivities surfaced in his first pagework as a member of the group Students Five, a collective of friends—Joe Good, Jerry McMillan (both high-school classmates of Ruscha’s), Patrick Blackwell, Don Moore, and later Wall Batterton. Their mailer/bulletin, Orb,9 published in seven issues between 1959 and 1960 by Chouinard’s Society of Graphic Designers, contained an amalgam of cartoons, collages, graphic experiments, texts, and exhibition announcements. Ruscha edited and laid out the issues on a single seventeen-by-twenty-two-inch sheet, printing it recto-verso in an elaborate overlapping two-color system and folding it six times down for dissemination through the mail. Commenting on the genesis of Orb’s design, Ruscha would say, “I pasted the thing up and I maybe was thinking in the back of my head, Dada, ’cause they kind of echo a lot of the things that the Dadaists were doing. Things can be upside down, they don’t have to be orderly, you don’t have to have a proper well-behaved page line.”10
An untitled text-and-photo collage by Ruscha highlights this radical inclination. Published in the final issue of Orb and dated September 30, 1960, the piece takes the form of a “letter written home to the mother of an art student,” wherein a starving artist pleads for funds for food. In the margins, the artist reveals that the cash would in fact be put to use “purchasing paint, pencils, paper and various other tools so necessary to an art student!!!!,” with the center of the collage being a homemade bomb crafted from found images of a “dry cell ignitor” wired to a vine of tomatoes. Beside the improvised explosive, Ruscha drolly scrawled a modified George Bernard Shaw quote: “The true artist will let his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.”
Ruscha’s penchant, exhibited in Orb—and reflected consistently in his future work—was to overtly maximize content within clearly demarcated spaces such as those defined by the edges of a sheet of paper, the lip of a canvas, an advertising block, covers of books, and the clean interior pages of artists’ publications. Stylistically, his typically unassuming grounds meant the work’s primary focus (texts and graphics) could be rapidly absorbed (or read) by viewers. Ruscha’s systems thus mimicked those long employed in the design of print advertising and highway billboards, where the effectiveness of one’s layout is measured by its capacity to capture attention in the brief span it takes to flip a magazine page or speed by in a car on an open road.
BURNING GASOLINE
All along Route 66 in the ’50s, gas stations dotted the sides of the road between Los Angeles and Oklahoma City. One or more at every roadside rest stop, town, and city spread out along the asphalt backbone crossing the heartland, lassoing and wrangling passing cars much as saloons with rails and water troughs once did roving cowboys and their horses. Ruscha’s 1950 Ford would have had a sixteen-gallon tank for fuel and gotten an average of around fifteen and a half miles per gallon. If his foot wasn’t heavy on the gas pedal, he could have driven, give or take, 250 miles between stops. Traveling back and forth with some regularity, Ruscha would have gotten to know the filling stations fairly well, and indeed he photographed many of them over a year and a half. “I think it started [in] maybe ’61 . . . shooting gas stations across the highway.”11
As with so many shaggy-dog stories, there’s a lack of clarity as to the origins of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Ruscha’s first publication. Did the photographs that form its content come to Ruscha’s mind first, or did its title? While the title page boldly states “1962” in large typography below the artist’s name, the colophon denotes the book’s publication year as being 1963.12
When asked in the late summer of 2019 about Twentysix Gasoline Stations and the role of artist’s books within his work, Ruscha said that the twenty-six stations he photographed along Route 66 “provided an excuse to make the book and otherwise I would have made the book anyway out of something else. . . . The real motivation I liked about it [was that] it had some kind of dark humor to it, and also I knew, well, if I made one book, I might as well make another one.” He continued, “I like my books because I felt like they lacked aesthetic value and they didn’t have a game plan. . . . So, in a certain sense, it’s the same as having an empty book like blank pages. If I showed it to somebody who worked in a gas station, they’d say, ‘Ah, great.’ If you showed it to a poet or an intellectual, they kind of dry up and say, ‘Are you putting me on?’” While the captions dryly note the location of each gas station, there’s no apparent rhyme or reason to the sequencing of images, as they don’t follow a straight path from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City; rather, they meander at random abandon among locales in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma before concluding with a final image of a FINA gas station in Groom, Texas.
As to the number twenty-six—which could easily align with the number of letters in the alphabet, if not religious numerology or an inversion of the purported publication date, ’62—he added, “I hiked from Oklahoma City to Miami and back when I was in junior high school with a friend, and I clearly recall that it took twenty-six rides to get down to Miami and twenty-six rides to get back to Oklahoma City. I’m opening up that as a possibility that maybe I was fixated on that number. And I knew it wouldn’t be twenty-five, knew it wouldn’t be twenty-seven, so it had to be twenty-six. And the reasoning behind it could easily be justified by saying, my hitchhiking days is what gave me that idea.”13 Indeed, Ruscha documented that adventure on an annotated copy of a Conoco Highway Map of United States inscribed with the caption “EDDIE RUSCHA–BILL ELDER HITCHIKING TRIP—SUMMER 1954.”14
The schemas of many of Ruscha’s drawings and paintings establish his idealization of how information could be conveyed in a flash.
Moreover, the schemas of many of Ruscha’s drawings and paintings from 1956—such as the cover designs he mocked up as two proposals for a student architectural journal, Arquitecto,15 on behalf of his sister, who was studying architecture in Mexico City—establish his idealization of how information could be conveyed in a flash via a clean, uncluttered layout, be it a book-cover-like format or, say, a twelve-inch LP record jacket.16 Further, paintings such as 1938, 1958, and Boss, 1961,17 and the drawing US 66, 1960,18 mark the absorption of Ruscha’s learned graphic-design knowledge into his painting practice and the beginning of his mature artworks. As Ruscha put it to me, “I like the idea of typography and books. . . . So I was thinking that maybe I’m painting book covers.”19
Throughout 1962, Ruscha created multiple drawings based on one of his photographs found near the center page of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, a three-quarter profile of a Standard gas station in Amarillo, Texas, captured like a starlet’s headshot.20 At the same time that he was producing those initial drawings, he executed Twentysix Gasoline Stations Opened to Title Page,21 a drawing featuring the book splayed open to its title page in an off-center rotation, highlighting the book’s title, author’s name, and 1962 date. Many drawings executed in 1963 of the book’s cover would relay it as a three-dimensional object, fanning page edges, exposing what would become the iconic Standard station in many successive works, idealizing the book as an object in action.22
Ruscha’s choice to use the font Beton Slab, printed in bright Signal Red, on the cover could be construed as a winking effort to confer on it the full weight of governmental authority, in that Stymie Extra Bold—Beton Slab’s doppelgänger—was used by the United States Government Printing Office on the covers of many of its publications in the ’50s and ’60s.23 Around this time, Ruscha also made multiple works that incorporated a Sun-Maid Raisins box—which likewise featured Beton Slab—such as Box Smashed Flat (Vicksburg), 1960–61.24 Beton Slab would remain one of Ruscha’s go-to fonts in much of his future work, appearing on the covers or title pages of nine of his seventeen artist’s books published between 1963 and 1978. It appeared again in many successive drawings and paintings and on the cover of the vinyl LP Music (1969),25 the design of which didn’t incorporate the name of the album’s musician—Williams—on the cover. This significant missing detail required Warner Bros. to place a clear adhesive sticker on the record’s protective shrink-wrap, reading: BY MASON WILLIAMS which was also printed using Beton Slab.26
Ruscha has been coy about how his artist’s books—most of them self-published, and all but one priced between $2.50 and $10—operated as tools to reach wider audiences. To get Twentysix Gasoline Stations into the world, Ruscha crafted a humorous, if not ironic, advertisement promoting the publication in the pages of the March 1964 issue of Artforum. Announcing in its header that the Library of Congress had rejected the book, the ad directed potential customers to make their purchase, at $3 a copy, from Wittenborn & Company in New York City or from the book’s publisher, National Excelsior. (Ruscha appropriated the name for himself from the front cover of the 1955 National Excelsior datebook,27 which he was using as a daybook, idea journal, and sketchbook at the time.28) This advertisement would become the first of six artist’s projects Ruscha crafted for Artforum,29 as well as one of the first interventions by an artist outside of the editorial process into the magazine itself.30
The reality of being a small publisher required Ruscha to seek other tools of the trade to sell his wares—a pamphlet, a poster, a movie, and a flyer31 were all produced to spur sales. Additionally, he seeded the books through the art world, sending copies to movers and shakers including Martin Friedman, the director of the Walker Art Center, whose copy of Business Cards, 1968, was inscribed by Billy Al Bengston, Ruscha’s collaborator on the book, A BRIBE FOR MARTIN FRIEDMAN;32 Museum of Modern Art, New York, curator Kynaston McShine, who included Ruscha’s artist’s books in his 1970 show “Information” (McShine’s copy of Business Cards was inscribed FOR KYNASTON—YOU OWE US TEN BUCKS A[ND] WE DON’T FORGET;33 Henry Hopkins, who was an influential presence in Los Angeles prior to becoming the director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, eventually presenting a large-scale Ruscha traveling retrospective in 1982; and many, many others. It’s not hard to imagine Ruscha, a week or two after mailing a book, following up with a phone call and asking the recipient in his Oklahoman drawl, “Hey, you get my book?” as an icebreaker toward discussing other business.
That the books were inexpensive, easy to disseminate, catchy in title and contents, and somewhat mysterious, as Ruscha pointed out, encouraged the publications to linger in the mind of “readers” like dewdrops on a bottle of cold beer on a hot Los Angeles afternoon.
Ruscha has been coy about how his artist’s books operated as tools to reach wider audiences.
. . . SAYS GOODBYE . . .
From October 1965 to summer 1969, Ruscha had a “side hustle,” making between $400 and $500 monthly34 doing paste-up production for Artforum, appearing on the magazine’s masthead under the pseudonym Eddie Russia. Russia’s job—using templates that had been set up when the magazine was originally based in San Francisco—started after Artforum fully relocated to Los Angeles following publication of its September 1965 issue, taking office space above Ferus Gallery at 7231⁄2 La Cienega Boulevard, and continued after it moved to New York City with the May 1967 issue. “I’d get on a plane, arrive in New York on a Thursday afternoon. . . . I’d stay with a friend, and then Friday morning I’d go up on Madison Avenue to their offices,” Ruscha recalled. “And they had this little cubby hole in the back there, and I would work Friday, Saturday, and then get on a plane on Sunday and come back.”35
While Ruscha described the job as simply working with a preestablished template that he didn’t design, it afforded him the opportunity for some high jinks. For the cover of Artforum’s Surrealism special issue in September 1966, the editors commissioned his work Surrealism Soaped and Scrubbed, an image composed by Ruscha and photographed by Patrick Blackwell (also a fellow Oklahoman).
Four months later, Ruscha would pull off a grander caper within the pages of the January 1967 issue. After tendering the trade of an undocumented artwork in the form of a plaque that read CALIFORNIA36 with Artforum’s then-publisher, Charles Cowles, for advertising space, Ruscha received page seven, a favorable right-hand page in the magazine.
He then enlisted the photographer Jerry McMillan, his friend since the two had attended junior high in Oklahoma City, to stage a photo session in the bedroom belonging to Williams and actress Nancy Ames. Initially, Skip Farley—the wife of painter Jack Farley—Ruscha, and future founders of New York’s Metro Pictures Janelle Reiring and Helene Winer were splayed on Williams and Ames’s bed. However, as McMillan would say, “we had three and so it got a little crowded and it didn’t look quite right so we asked [Winer] to step out,”37 turning the scene into a ménage à trois. The resulting image, shot from a vantage above the foot of the ornate bed, shows Ruscha apparently in slumber, spooning a sleeping Reiring with his arm draped over her back, and Farley, also in slumber with a grin on her face, spooning Ruscha, a hand resting on his shoulder. To complete the ad, gallerist Irving Blum provided the text, ED RUSCHA SAYS GOODBYE TO COLLEGE JOYS,38 casting the intervention as a tongue-in-cheek announcement to the eleven thousand Artforum subscribers of Ruscha’s impending marriage to Danna Knego. Unlike Lynda Benglis’s “dildo ad,” which would run in the November 1974 issue, spurring months of heated debate about the ethics of an artist using the ad pages of the magazine as an “intrusion” into its editorial space, in addition to the appropriateness of the image itself, Ruscha’s ad received merely a kind of “Huh?” from the magazine’s editors and the general public, not unlike the reception to his artist’s books.
In September 1963, shortly after the publication of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Artforum ran a short review of the book by the managing editor, Philip Leider, who had a regular books column in the magazine. Alongside short blurbs about new books on Modigliani and Miró and volumes titled Maine and Its Role in American Art and The Art of the West in the Middle Ages, Leider penned three paragraphs about Twentysix Gasoline Stations, making it the longest review in the issue.
Leider began, “It is perhaps unfair to write a review of a book which, by now, is probably completely unavailable. But the book is so curious, and so doomed to oblivion that there is an obligation, of sorts, to document its existence, record its having been here, in the same way, almost, as other pages record and document the ephemeral existence of exhibitions which are mounted, shown, and then broken up forever.” He then obliquely noted that the slender volume would either sell quickly or be remaindered owing to its lack of sales and distribution or its flat-out oddity as a book that was as blunt as its title, just photographs of twenty-six gas stations. Instead, it sold well enough for Ruscha to reprint it twice, ultimately producing 3,900 copies. It was circulated widely, inspiring artists including John Baldessari—who, in the fall of 1963, became perhaps the first artist to purchase a copy in a bookshop39—Hanne Darboven, Louise Lawler, Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, and a multitude of others to make artists’ books. These publications were not a platform for the reproduction of existing art but a primary venue for new art to be presented within handheld traveling gallery spaces. Further, this platform could reach a far greater number of individuals than would visit a standard gallery venue, offering a lasting shelf life far exceeding the limited run of traditional exhibitions.
“ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN,” organized by Christophe Cherix with Ana Torok and Kiko Aebi, is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 10–January 13, 2023; travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, April 7–October 6, 2024.
David Platzker is an art historian, curator, and dealer.
NOTES
1. Patricia Failing, “Ed Ruscha, Young Artist: Dead Serious About Being Nonsensical,” Artnews, vol. 81, no. 4, April 1982, reprinted in Ed Ruscha: Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages, ed. Alexandra Schwartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 228.
2. Ruscha, oral history interview by Paul Karlstrom, October 29, 1980–October 2, 1981, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, transcript aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-edward-ruscha-12887.
3. Ruscha, in conversation with the author, Culver City, CA, September 10, 2019.
4. Ruscha, conversation.
5. See the Online Archive of California’s finding aid to the Plantin Press Papers, oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf4z09n9h8/.
6. Ruscha, conversation.
7. Designed and published by Wallace Berman, Semina was issued in nine volumes between 1955 and 1964.
8. The American edition of Marcel Duchamp was published by Grove Press in 1959 following the French edition, which was issued by Trianon Press earlier the same year. Beyond the text and artworks reproduced within the book, Ruscha may have been inspired in particular by the collaged series of images of Duchamp’s works printed on the reverse side of the book’s dust jacket and by the scattered overlapping drawings on its endpapers in particular. A copy of the book was held within Chouinard’s library. This specific copy of the book was donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2013 by the author of this essay. Romantically, one might consider this well-read copy to have been instrumental to the development of artists who attended or taught at Chouinard, including Terry Allen, John Altoon, Larry Bell, Llyn Foulkes, Joe Goode, Jack Goldstein, Robert Irwin, Ruscha, and many others, as this title was the only substantial English-language book on Duchamp prior to the publication of his Pasadena retrospective catalogue in 1963 and Arturo Schwarz’s catalogue raisonné of Duchamp’s work, issued in 1970.
9. See A1957.02-d.7 in Ed Ruscha: An Archive of Projects [Other Stuff] (New York: Gagosian; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 57.
10. Ruscha, conversation.
11. Ruscha, conversation
12. Ruscha inscribed copy no. 1 of the four hundred numbered copies of the first edition of Twentysix Gasoline Stations with the dedication “To Patty with love, Ed. May 24–June 2, 1963.” See Buy Early / Die Late (New York: John McWhinnie/Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 2010), 86–87.
13. Ruscha, conversation.
14. See A1954.04 in Ed Ruscha: An Archive of Projects, 48.
15. See A1956.03 and A1956.04 in Ed Ruscha: An Archive of Projects, 49.
16. From the 1960s to the present, Ruscha designed many books, periodicals, magazine covers, posters, LP jackets, and other promotional materials for friends and as commercial work. A small sampling of these projects includes covers for Bicyclists Dismount (1964), A1964.08; Adventures in Poetry (1969), A1969.08; Music (1969), A1969.02; Rhymes of a Jerk (1974), A1974.02; Dinner at Mme— (1977), A1977.04; California Rock—California Sound (1978), A1978.06; Before Calculus: Functions, Graphs & Analytic Geometry (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), A1985.03; Thrift Store Paintings (1990), A1990.02; The Band: A Musical History (2005), A2005.01; Geoff Muldaur and the Texas Sheiks (2009), A2009.05; an imaginary record sleeve (2010), A2010.01; and It Happened to Me (2018), A2018.02, in Ed Ruscha: An Archive of Projects. See also in the same volume A1954.03, A1965.03, A1965.04, A1966.03, A1968.04, A1968.07, A1969.12, A1971.07, A1972.01, A1974.02, A1975.09, A1982.01, A1982.02, A1983.02, A1983.07, A1986.05, M1991.01, A1992.02, A1995.05, A2000.02, A2001.04, A2002.02, A2007.02, A2014.07, A2015.02, A2015.04, A2016.02, and A2017.01. Rather than artworks or artists’ projects, Ruscha thinks of most of these efforts as side or commercial jobs—stuff produced out of friendship or, regarding the earlier productions, as a means of support.
17. See: P1958.01 and P1961.05 in Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, vol. 1, 1958–1970 (New York: Gagosian; Göttingen: Steidl, 2003), 16–17, 46–47, 233.
18. See: D1960.12 in Edward Ruscha, Works on Paper, vol. 1, 1956–1976 (New York: Gagosian; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 53.
19. Ruscha, conversation.
20. See D1962.47 to D1962.53 in Works on Paper, 1:100–102. Those drawings would become the templates for a multitude of Standard station paintings and prints.
21. See D1962.56 in Works on Paper, 1:103.
22. See D1963.56 through D1963.62 in Works on Paper, 1:128–30.
23. Stymie Extra Bold was used as the title font of the front covers of the book Specimens of Type Faces in the United States Government Printing Office, published in Washington, DC, by the US Government Printing Office in 1950 and 1960. It is further documented on pages 117–18 of the 1950 edition and pages 124–25 of the 1960 edition. Beton Slab was not included in this publication.
24. See P1961.02 in Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, 1:40–41.
25. See A1969.02 Ed Ruscha: An Archive of Projects, 103.
26. Beton Slab made its first appearance in Ruscha’s work in the single letter E within his photograph Type, 1957 (A1957.01), in Ed Ruscha: An Archive of Projects, 49. Beton would return in his work with the drawing Study for Box Smashed Flat(Vicksburg), 1960–61 (D1960.11), and the associated painting Box Smashed Flat, 1960–61 (P1961.02), both depicting the design and typography of a period Sun-Maid Raisins box.
27. See Ruscha’s National Excelsior, from the series Seven Products, 1961, on the website of San Francisco’s de Young and Legion of Honor, famsf.org/artworks/national-excelsior-from-the-series-seven-products.
28. See M1964.01 in Ed Ruscha: An Archive of Projects) 71.
29. Ruscha’s artists’ projects for Artforum included Rejected Oct. 2, 1963 by the Library of Congress, Washington 25, D.C. (A1964.01); the layout for the article “Concerning ‘Various Small Fires’: Edward Ruscha Discusses His Perplexing Publications” (A1965.01); the commissioned cover design Surrealism Soaped and Scrubbed (A1966.0A); the faux advertisement “Ed Ruscha Says Goodbye to College Joys” (A1967.01); an advertisement for his artist’s book Crackers (A1969.11); and Advertisement for “Paintings: January 1970” (A1970.02), a promotion for his one-man exhibit at Alexander Iolas Gallery, New York, all in Ed Ruscha: An Archive of Projects.
30. Artist Arthur Secunda placed small advertisements offering private art classes in Artforum within the May and June 1963 issues. An unattributed half-page advertisement for Joe Goode also appears in the March 1964 issue of Artforum.
31. See A1968.05, A1969.13, A1971.01, and A1971.03 in Ed Ruscha: An Archive of Projects.
32. The work can be viewed online at the Walker’s website, at walkerart.org/collections/artworks/business-cards.
33. This copy of Business Cards is documented on the Museum of Modern Art Library’s website: library.moma.org/permalink/01NYAINST/90vked/alma991003647919707141.
34. Ruscha, conversation.
35. Ruscha, conversation.
36. Artist’s studio, email to author, June 28, 2023.
37. “Ed Ruscha, Jerry McMillan, and Mason Williams Oral History: Part 1 of 4,” oral history interview, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, January 23–24, 2007, video, 50:15, youtube.com/watch?v=lmSjvlYcFQc. Quote appears at 16:50.
38. Ruscha, conversation.
39. Laurence and Geraldine McGilvery’s Nexus Bookshop in La Jolla, CA, was the first bookstore to stock Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Correspondence from Ruscha to Laurence McGilvery dated October 15, 1963, and October 20, 1963. Collection of Dr. Paul Marks, Toronto.
