Ed Ruscha and Gregory Crewdson take their lunch pails to work

In these online 30-minute events, Gregory Crewdson, Director of Graduate Studies in Photography, asks each guest a list of simple questions about artistic practice, and the anticipation of an end to the pandemic crisis.

Ed Ruscha (b. 1937, Omaha, Nebraska, USA) lives and works in Los Angeles. At the start of his artistic career, Ruscha called himself an “abstract artist ... who deals with subject matter.” Abandoning academic connotations that came to be associated with Abstract Expressionism, he looked instead to tropes of advertising and brought words—as form, symbol, and material—to the forefront of painting. Working in diverse media with humor and wit, he oscillates between sign and substance, locating the sublime in landscapes both natural and artificial.

Ruscha’s paintings of the 1960s explore the noise and the fluidity of language. With works such as "OOF" (1962–63)—which presents the exclamation in yellow block letters on a blue ground—it is nearly impossible to look at the painting without verbalizing the visual. Since his first exhibition with Gagosian in 1993, Ruscha has had twenty-one solo exhibitions with the gallery, including "Custom-Built Intrigue: Drawings 1974–84" (2017), comprising a decade of reverse-stencil drawings of phrases rendered in pastel, dry pigment, and various edible substances, from spinach to carrot juice. The first retrospective of Ruscha’s drawings was held in 2004 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Ruscha continues to influence contemporary artists worldwide, his formal experimentations and clever use of the American vernacular evolving in form and meaning as technology and internet platforms alter the essence of human communication. Ruscha represented the United States at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005) with Course of Empire, an installation of ten paintings. Inspired by nineteenth century American artist Thomas Cole’s famous painting cycle of the same name, the work alludes to the pitfalls surrounding modernist visions of progress. In 2018 Ruscha’s "Course of Empire" was presented concurrently with Cole’s at the National Gallery in London.

Ruscha’s most recent shows include "Ed Ruscha: OKLA," an ongoing exhibition at the Oklahoma Contemporary that explores the artist’s childhood upbringing in Oklahoma, and Paintings at Gagosian New York.

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Part of the 2021 reprise of the Yale Photo MFA program’s Pop Up Lecture Series via Zoom, in which Gregory Crewdson, Director of Graduate Studies in Photography, interviews guests on the pandemic crisis and the nature of artistic practice.

Full information available here: https://www.art.yale.edu/photo-pop-up...