Ed Ruscha was born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska, moved to Oklahoma City in 1941, and to Los Angeles in 1956 to complete his education at the Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of Arts). As early as 1963, he began showing his work at the progressive Ferus Gallery in Law and had his first international show in Cologne, Germany at Galerie Rudolf Zwirner. A few years later, Ruscha began showing his work with the legendary Leo Castelli in New York, as did Richard Serra, Cy Tombly, Roy Lichtenstein, and other world renowned American artists from this period. Subsequently, Ruscha exhibited with the Gagosian Gallery in New York and Beverly Hills.
In 1998, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles organized a retrospective of Ruscha's works on paper. A major retrospective of Ruscha's career opened at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. in June 2000 and travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Miami Art Museum, and the Modern Art Museum of Ft. Worth, Texas. In 2001, Ruscha was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters as a member of the Department of Art. Ruscha was the United States representative at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005.
