This project arose from a shared desire to understand Ed Ruscha’s relationship to a wide range of thinkers invested in studying, representing, and making sense of cities, images, and information. We believed there was a new story to tell about Ruscha through his impressive Streets of Los Angeles (SoLA) Archive, but telling this story about an artist who has had a profound impact on contemporary art required rethinking much of what we knew about Ruscha, Los Angeles, photography, and archives. As such, this project would not have been possible, nor would its intellectual premises have been achieved, without generous collaboration across departments, institutions, and professional fields, both at Getty and beyond.
Our team has frequently joked that the Getty Research Institute (GRI) could have been temporarily renamed the Getty “Ruscha” Institute because so many of our colleagues were contributing to this project. We feel very fortunate to have had the support of these numerous colleagues while we navigated together the exciting opportunities and challenges of interdisciplinarity. We extend our thanks to our project’s Executive Steering Committee, which included Mary Miller, David Newbury, Glenn Phillips, Lela Urquhart, Lily Pregill, Richard Fagen, and Anne Helmreich.
After acquiring the two Ruscha archives that compose what we refer to as the SoLA Archive, Getty processed, digitized, and generated additional metadata about the materials to facilitate research. Nathaniel Deines, alongside Teresa Soleau, led an inimitable team to execute this stage of the project. We extend our thanks to John Kiffe, Laura Sokolosky, Brendan Threadgill, Matt Moore, Linta Kunnathuparambil, and Tavo Olmos for making the SoLA Archive accessible for the first time and viewable in a form other than on motion-picture film stock. We also want to remember our dear colleague, Chris Edwards; his clever and innovative approach to digitizing Ruscha’s archive was a testament to his skill and a tremendous asset to the project.
We are grateful for the leadership of Lily Pregill, collection platforms director at Getty Digital, and the team that included Andra Darlington, Teresa Soleau, Matt Moore, Trang Dang, and Lindsey Gant. We likewise extend our sincere thanks to David Newbury, senior director of public technologies at Getty Digital, as well as to Adam Brin, Kristen Carter, Alyx Rossetti, Josh Gomez, and Robert Sanderson, who contributed to developing user interfaces (UIs) for accessing the archive. We are also grateful to Stace Maples, assistant director of Geospatial Collections and Services at Stanford University Libraries, and Brainfood, a web application development studio, for their instrumental role in processing the archive. Processing, digitization, metadata generation, and UI development were activities that required creative thinking about the possibilities that a photography archive like this might afford. We hope that these collaborations pave the way for future opportunities to think across digitization, accessibility, and archives.
Former curatorial department members John Tain and Rani Singh acquired the archive in 2011 and initiated the research project component. Without their initial vision and enthusiasm, the project would never have come about. Beth Guynn skillfully cataloged and, with the help of Linda Kleiger, processed the archive on its intake. Thank you to the staff of Special Collections for facilitating many workshops and viewing sessions of the SoLA Archive, especially Mahsa Hatam, Evan Dresman, David Castro, Daniel Powazek, and Ted Walbye. We were committed to grounding our investigation of Ruscha in the material itself and interrogating how it could be put into conversation with the digitized negatives.
Greg Albers, digital publications manager at Getty Publications, has accompanied us on every stage of the journey as we imagined how to translate this book into a sustainable, preserved Quire publication. The book is what it is thanks to the editorial prowess of Michele Ciaccio, Lauren Edson, Adriana Romero, Laura Santiago, Karen Ehrmann, and other colleagues across both Getty Publications and Getty Research Institute Publications.
We extend our gratitude to Virginia Farrell and Susan Colangelo for providing administrative support on research trips, budgets, and workshop coordination. We also received important research support from the Harry Ransom Center that holds the production archives of the second printing of Every Building on the Sunset Strip from 1971.
We could not have envisioned this book project without the sustained focus and collaboration from Stamen Design—especially Eric Rodenbeck, Nicolette Hayes, Eric Brelsford, Alan McConchie, Vinay Dixit, and Kelsey Taylor—whose dedicated and energized team enacted and made possible each of our speculative ideas for the book design and the data visualizations. Our collaboration with Stamen began with their website design of “12 Sunsets: Exploring Ed Ruscha’s Archive,” an interactive presentation of Ruscha’s photographs that gave the world access to his SoLA project for the first time. We spent many an hour “driving” our car along the virtual streets of Sunset Boulevard. We would also like to thank Polskin Arts for their assistance in sharing this work with the public.
The GRI’s SoLA project has always been about more than publishing a book. Indeed, it has acted as a think tank of sorts on research related to digital art history, art in the United States, urban studies, architectural history, and information studies. We believe that the process of knowledge formation has been just as consequential as the final product. We began to host workshops to shape the scope of the book in 2018 after initiating a multidisciplinary call for projects (CFP) the previous year. We were aided by a generous grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art for a digital publication workshop in 2020. We were interested in investigating Ruscha from numerous perspectives. We are grateful for all those who answered the CFP as well as our fantastic group of contributors whose essays compose this book. We feel lucky many scholars participated in our workshops, and their perspectives on Ruscha helped us to define our stakes and our intervention in various fields. Thank you to Ed Dimendberg, Virginia Heckert, Juan De Lara, Jon Leaver, Shannon Mattern, Safiya Umoja Noble, David Platzker, Alexandra Schwartz, and Sally Stein. We feel lucky to have worked with such an incredible group of contributors to this project; their brilliant insights, sustained attention, generous collaborations, and friendships will be sorely missed.
This book would not have been possible without the generosity of Ruscha’s studio team, including Mary Dean, Susan Haller, Gary Regester, and Paul Ruscha. They graciously answered our questions and kindly supported the project from its inception. We are also grateful to Jerry McMillan for providing us with invaluable insights into his early involvement with the project.
To gain novel insights into Ruscha’s career, we wanted to involve a new generation of artists working in and thinking about Los Angeles. From 2021 to 2022, we hosted a series of public conversations titled “Imaginaries of L.A.” that brought artists in dialogue with curators and scholars to discuss Ruscha’s legacy and the current challenges of making art in and about Los Angeles. Their perspectives on the city were unique and generative. The participants included Julian Myers-Szupinska, Edgar Arceneaux, Guadalupe Rosales, Pilar Tompkins Rivas, Umar Rashid (also known as Frohawk Two Feathers), Sandy Rodriguez, Laura Pulido, Michelle Caswell, and Kandis Williams. We thank Chelsea Anderson and the entire programming team at the GRI for supporting these events.
We are deeply appreciative to the curatorial team at the Museum of Modern Art, including Christophe Cherix, Ana Torok, and Kiko Aebi for including GRI material in their exhibition ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN (2023–24), and for featuring our video on the archive, “LA Stories: Urbanism, Music, and AI in Ruscha’s Archive.” This beautiful, dynamic, and thought-provoking video was produced by Ways & Means to animate Ruscha’s work for the general public. We are grateful to the Ways & Means team, especially Matthew Miller, Lana Kim, Jett Steiger, Grant Keiner, Steph Max, Sean Leonard, Jackson Keeler, Casey Genton, Matthew Miller, Andrew Steinitz, and Ali Helnwein. We are likewise thankful to the curatorial team at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, including Michael Govan, Rebecca Morse, and Deliasofia Zacarias, for highlighting the GRI’s archive and the video in their iteration of ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN (2024).
We would like to make a special mention of the core team members, who all dedicated several years to bringing the project, and thus this book, to fruition. Karly Wildenhaus acted as the first project manager, followed by Megan Sallabedra and then Isabel Frampton Wade. They capably led an organized, productive, and creative team through many challenges, including a global pandemic, and their input on each aspect of the book project was invaluable. In her role as research specialist, Tracy Stuber transformed our thinking about the digital presentation and data visualization of the archive. Research assistants C. C. Marsh, Whitney Graham, Margot Yale, and Homer Arnold were incredibly resourceful and enterprising when entering a complex project at various stages along the way, and each brought invaluable insights and impressive dedication to their work. We are immensely grateful to them and proud of the work we have achieved together as well as the community we have fostered throughout the project.
Finally, our deepest thanks to Ed Ruscha for embarking on a journey to document and better understand the streets of Los Angeles.
—Andrew Perchuk, Zanna Gilbert, and Emily Pugh