2013 Made in U.S.A.: Rosenquist/Ruscha

Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation

Exhibition Dates: September 20 – December 14, 2013

This exhibit pairs two of the most influential and complex artists in the Pop art genre, with a selection of prints that spans each artist’s career.

So, two Pop artists – one East Coast, the other West Coast; one “hot,” the other “cool.” Both James Rosenquist and Ed Ruscha grew up in the midwest in the 1940s, but Rosenquist went to New York (from Minnesota) and Ruscha went to Los Angeles (from Oklahoma).

Both artists worked as commercial artists early in their careers: Rosenquist was a billboard painter; Ruscha a layout artist for an advertising agency. Both artists reveled in the mind-opening poetics of ordinary everyday imagery: Rosenquist in his wild smash-ups of seemingly disjointed imagery; Ruscha in his use of words as image.

You could say that Rosenquist expressed the intense compression of imagery he encountered in New York, while Ruscha responded to the more isolated, horizontal and open spaces of Southern California.

Both artists have made prints in parallel to their paintings, throughout their long careers.

All works in the exhibition come from the vast collection of contemporary prints and multiples from Jordan D. Schnitzer and the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation. We are grateful for his passion for art and his generous loans so our audience can experience such a wide range of work by these two modern masters.

*The Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation makes its collections of post-war prints and multiples available without exhibition fees, and institutions have the opportunity to request grants to underwrite educational and outreach activities. The collections are conceived of as a “lending library” with a mission to loan and exhibit contemporary prints and multiples in order to further appreciate the artists of our time.