Recognition
The muralist Kent Twitchell painted a 11,000-square-foot mural in Downtown Los Angeles to honor Ruscha entitled the Ed Ruscha Monument between 1978 and 1987. The mural was preserved until 2006 when it was illegally painted over. The band Talking Heads Ruscha's eponymous 1974 painting for their "Sand in the Vaseline" compilation album. The band Various Cruelties, based around Liam O'Donnell, was named after Ruscha's painting of the same name of 1974.
In 2001, Ruscha was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters as a member of the Department of Art, after having previously received its Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Purchase Fund Award in 1992. In 2004 he was elected an Honorary Royal Academician of London’s Royal Academy of Arts. He was honored with the cultural prize of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (DGPh, ‘German Society for Photography’) in 2006, the Aspen Award for Art in 2008, and the National Arts Award for Artistic Excellence in 2009. He also received honorary doctorate degrees from the California College of the Arts (2001), Rhode Island School of Design (2008), and the San Francisco Art Institute (2009).
Between 2006 and 2012, Ruscha served on the board of trustees of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in Los Angeles where he had previously been included in eight special exhibits. In 2012, he was the honoree of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Art + Film gala; in a speech, the mueums's director Michal Govan paid tribute to the artist, quoting the novelist J. G. Ballard: “Ed Ruscha has the coolest gaze in American art.”
In 2009, Ruscha’s I Think I’ll... (1983) from the collection of the National Gallery was installed at the White House. In 2010, during British prime minister David Cameron's first visit to Washington, President Barack Obama presented him with a signed lithograph by Ruscha, Column With Speed Lines, chosen for its red, white and blue colours.
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