Edward RuschaAmerican, 1937Every Building on the Sunset Strip
Can I see it?
Not on view at present
Where is “Every Building on the Sunset Strip” now? Collection: Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge. Not on view at present. Checked September 29, 2026.
Cambridge, United States
It belongs to the collection, but is not on display at present.
- Checked
- In this state since
- Source
- The museum
About the work
On a Sunday morning, Ruscha loaded an automatic camera, looped around every building on the Sunset Strip to expose one mile of night-life fame in broad daylight, and accordion-folded it in book. Now unfold the vice versa panorama and a flnerie-on-wheels immediately begins to stretch out left and right, upon and down the boulevard, but so smooth and silent and straight is the sliding ride over the luster of the printed page that the caressing eye irons out any possible photographic depth in the scenography of Los Angeles. To sweep the Strip further would only wear its legend even thinner. Ruscha's photo-books were a complete anomaly in the art scene of sixties.
Read on
They later became a brand name once they have been situated by critics and historians in relation to Marcel Duchamp's ready-made and Andy Warhol's serial reproduction techniques (both artists had their first American exhibit, in Los Angeles, in 1962 when Ruscha published his initial Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations) as well as the aestheticizing of everyday architecture with Robert Venturi's 1972 Learning from Las Vegas. They also troubled the conventions of artist's books by using offset printing to develop "a mass-production of a higher order," and more importantly, freed the double-bind between book and photograph in which one was either the commentary, or the illustration of the other.
Harvard Art Museums
Details
- Accession number
- 2.1993
In the catalog
Sources
- Harvard Art Museums
- Image: Harvard Art Museums — © President and Fellows of Harvard College
In the life of Edward Ruscha
The whole life1965–1969
Layout designer at Artforum as “Eddie Russia”
After college he worked as a layout artist for the Carson-Roberts advertising agency in Los Angeles, and from 1965 to 1969 as layout designer for Artforum magazine under the pseudonym “Eddie Russia”; in 1969 he was a visiting professor of printing and drawing at UCLA.
1966
“Every Building on the Sunset Strip” is published
A book of continuous photographs of a two-and-a-half-mile stretch of the 24-mile Sunset Boulevard.
1966
“Los Angeles Now” in London — his first European exhibition
Ruscha is included in “Los Angeles Now” at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London, his first European exhibition.
1967
Marries Danna Knego
He marries Danica “Danna” Knego, whom he met in 1965; the couple has two children, a son, Edward “Eddie”, and a daughter, Sonny.
1967–1970
Self-imposed exile from painting: gunpowder and graphite drawings
During a period of self-imposed exile from painting (1967–1970) he makes gunpowder and graphite drawings: single words in a trompe l'oeil technique, as if formed from ribbons of curling paper.
1968
First solo show in Europe, in Cologne
His first European solo show takes place in Cologne, at Galerie Rudolf Zwirner.
