Ed Ruscha

There may not be another painter that has captured the feeling of Los Angeles better than Ed Ruscha. He's wrung resonance from gas station signs, loneliness from advertisements and epic wonder from the most tedious urban detritus. Here he signs a loving retrospective of his work, "Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting," with texts by James Ellroy, Richard Wagner and many others. Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. 7 p.m. Saturday. www.booksoup.com.

"William Wegman: He Took Two Pictures. One Came Out," an exhibition of the artist's text-based black-and-white photographs from the 1970s, is on view at Marc Selwyn Fine Art through July 6. So you have a new show of your old work. Yes, and it's new old work. The bulk of it is work that I came across relatively recently. I was going to move to New York temporarily from L.A., Santa Monica. I was there from '70 to '72 and a half. When I moved temporarily, I gave my studio to John Baldessari with the thought that I would come back.

Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha and Chinese architect Wang Shu have been named to Time magazine's new list of the 100 most influential people in the world. The annual list, which features personalities from politics, business, sports and culture, was released on Thursday. Last year, Wang won the Pritzker Prize, the highest honor in the field of architecture. A resident of Hangzhou, located west of Shanghai, Wang has worked almost exclusively in China. His buildings include the Ningbo Museum of Art and the Ningbo Museum of History.

Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha and Chinese architect Wang Shu have been named to Time magazine's new list of the 100 most influential people in the world. The annual list, which features personalities from politics, business, sports and culture, was released on Thursday. Last year, Wang won the Pritzker Prize, the highest honor in the field of architecture. A resident of Hangzhou, located west of Shanghai, Wang has worked almost exclusively in China. His buildings include the Ningbo Museum of Art and the Ningbo Museum of History.

You don't hear much about street photography anymore. There are lots of reasons why. One, hitherto unacknowledged, is that artist Ed Ruscha's extraordinary photo books turned the genre upside down in the 1960s. It hasn't been the same since. FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of this article included a caption that identified the photograph as "untitled. " The photograph is titled "Los Angeles, California. " In the '60s, street photography's art world stature was peaking.

"I was a beatnik, and then I was a hippie, and before that I was a bohemian," a sky-high Dennis Hopper confided to Merv Griffin on television one night in 1971, in a clip you can see on YouTube. On the opposite couch, Willie Mays uncomfortably refilled his glass of water and James Brolin sneered - Hopper certainly didn't belong to their worlds. But "San Francisco Giants legends" and "future husbands of Barbra Streisand" might be among the few groups in which Dennis Hopper could not claim membership.

Ed Ruscha has followed three other high-profile Los Angeles artists in a rapid flight from the board of L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art. John Baldessari had been the first to exit, on Thursday, followed on Friday by Barbara Kruger and Catherine Opie, and now Ruscha, whose 1970 installation, "Chocolate Room," and 1968 painting "Lisp" are among the signature works in MOCA's collection. No artists remain on the board, which now has 32 voting members, down from 40 in February. Ruscha submitted his resignation Sunday in an email to museum director Jeffrey Deitch.

Following a week in which John Baldessari, Catherine Opie and Barbara Kruger all resigned from the board of trustees at Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art, Ed Ruscha has also resigned, leaving no artists remaining on the museum's board. The artist's wife, Danna Ruscha, posted the following comment on the Facebook page of L.A. Times art critic Christopher Knight, beneath a piece he wrote on the pivotal role of artists in shaping MOCA historically and the warning sent by the current exodus: "‎Christopher Knight, Ed has resigned.

LACMA has confirmed that its next Art + Film Gala, an annual event designed to help the museum shore up support from Hollywood leaders, will honor filmmaker Stanley Kubrick alongside artist Ed Ruscha . Scheduled for Oct. 27, the event is co-chaired by Los Angeles County Museum of Art trustee Eva Chow (wife of restaurateur Michael Chow) and actor Leonardo DiCaprio. Steven Spielberg has agreed to pay a “special tribute” to Kubrick. Many of the museum's trustees, including Terry Semel , Brian Grazer, Michael Lynton and Steve Tisch , have industry ties.

Ed Ruscha's new paintings, the subject of a Gagosian Gallery show that opened Friday in Beverly Hills, look like they are haunted by the ghost of Pop Art. The canvases are filled with images of assorted objects, many branded: a tire, a Perrier bottle, a Bud Light carton. But instead of bright, shiny images à la Warhol, the objects here are in various stages of disarray or decay. The tire is blown; the bottle is discarded; the carton is crumpled. And the dominant colors are muted earth tones.

"I was a beatnik, and then I was a hippie, and before that I was a bohemian," a sky-high Dennis Hopper confided to Merv Griffin on television one night in 1971, in a clip you can see on YouTube. On the opposite couch, Willie Mays uncomfortably refilled his glass of water and James Brolin sneered - Hopper certainly didn't belong to their worlds. But "San Francisco Giants legends" and "future husbands of Barbra Streisand" might be among the few groups in which Dennis Hopper could not claim membership.

British pop-rockers Florence and the Machine will be the musical attraction this fall for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's second annual Art + Film Gala. The band, whose booking LACMA announced Tuesday, provides both typographical consistency and a musical and generational contrast to last year's inaugural Art + Film Gala headliner, Stevie Wonder. Big-voiced, red-haired Florence Welch debuted in 2009 as an heiress to the Kate Bush-led lineage of gothically dramatic British art-pop divas, while displaying soul music influences as well.

LACMA has confirmed that its next Art + Film Gala, an annual event designed to help the museum shore up support from Hollywood leaders, will honor filmmaker Stanley Kubrick alongside artist Ed Ruscha . Scheduled for Oct. 27, the event is co-chaired by Los Angeles County Museum of Art trustee Eva Chow (wife of restaurateur Michael Chow) and actor Leonardo DiCaprio. Steven Spielberg has agreed to pay a “special tribute” to Kubrick. Many of the museum's trustees, including Terry Semel , Brian Grazer, Michael Lynton and Steve Tisch , have industry ties.

Ed Ruscha has followed three other high-profile Los Angeles artists in a rapid flight from the board of L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art. John Baldessari had been the first to exit, on Thursday, followed on Friday by Barbara Kruger and Catherine Opie, and now Ruscha, whose 1970 installation, "Chocolate Room," and 1968 painting "Lisp" are among the signature works in MOCA's collection. No artists remain on the board, which now has 32 voting members, down from 40 in February. Ruscha submitted his resignation Sunday in an email to museum director Jeffrey Deitch.

Following a week in which John Baldessari, Catherine Opie and Barbara Kruger all resigned from the board of trustees at Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art, Ed Ruscha has also resigned, leaving no artists remaining on the museum's board. The artist's wife, Danna Ruscha, posted the following comment on the Facebook page of L.A. Times art critic Christopher Knight, beneath a piece he wrote on the pivotal role of artists in shaping MOCA historically and the warning sent by the current exodus: "‎Christopher Knight, Ed has resigned.

Nicolas Berggruen travels more in three months than most people do in a lifetime. Dubbed "the homeless billionaire" because he prefers living out of five-star hotels to owning any homes, his business and nonprofit ventures this winter alone have taken him to Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Beijing, New Delhi and Zurich, with a side trip to Antarctica. So it's not entirely surprising to learn that Berggruen, who owns a Gulfstream IV, is not big on cars. "I can drive," said the energetic, boyish-looking 50-year-old.

Most of the dozens of art spaces now showing off Southern California art history weren't even around when Ed Ruscha set up his easel and his style in Los Angeles in the 1950s . Ruscha's classic, defining works are keystones in Pacific Standard Time , a series of exhibitions whose 1945-to-1980 range takes a stab at framing two of the biggest and most elusive concepts around: "art" and "Los Angeles. " Ruscha's vision has had a defining hand in both. With his rescue dog Woody padding around his new Culver City studio, Ruscha uses one of his favorite mediums, words, to paint the vast and ambitious canvas of Pacific Standard Time -- and his place in it. What does this exhibition mean to you?

Ed Ruscha is often described as the definitive regional artist of Los Angeles. In his 1966 book "Every Building on the Sunset Strip" he photographed exactly that, and early in his career he painted grand homages to the Hollywood sign and the 20th Century Fox logo. More important, the style Ruscha developed in his paintings and graphics is a virtual blueprint of what's widely perceived as the California aesthetic.

The Getty Museum and Getty Research Institute have acquired two troves of photographs by Ed Ruscha that the Getty says will make its Brentwood hilltop a key repository for viewers and scholars to consider how photography — much of it showing grittier L.A. precincts — has fed the artist's oeuvre. "It makes the Getty a really rich place to understand the role of photography in Ed Ruscha's work," spokeswoman Amy Hood said Wednesday. The museum bought 74 prints and two contact sheets from Gagosian Gallery for an undisclosed price; many of those images are street-level or overhead views of Los Angeles scenes that Ruscha incorporated in a series of books he self-published starting in 1962.

Most of the dozens of art spaces now showing off Southern California art history weren't even around when Ed Ruscha set up his easel and his style in Los Angeles in the 1950s . Ruscha's classic, defining works are keystones in Pacific Standard Time , a series of exhibitions whose 1945-to-1980 range takes a stab at framing two of the biggest and most elusive concepts around: "art" and "Los Angeles. " Ruscha's vision has had a defining hand in both. With his rescue dog Woody padding around his new Culver City studio, Ruscha uses one of his favorite mediums, words, to paint the vast and ambitious canvas of Pacific Standard Time -- and his place in it. What does this exhibition mean to you?