The renowned artist Ed Ruscha was born in Nebraska, grew up in Oklahoma, and has lived and worked in Southern California since the late 1950s. Beginning in 1956, road trips across the American Southwest furnished a conceptual trove of themes and motifs that he mined throughout his career. The everyday landscapes of the West, especially as experienced from the automobileÑgas stations, billboards, building facades, parking lots, and long stretches of roadwayÑare the primary motifs of his often deadpan and instantly recognizable paintings and works on paper, as well as his influential artist books such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations and All the Buildings on the Sunset Strip. His iconic word imagesÑdeclaring Adios, Rodeo, Wheels over Indian Trails, and Honey . . . I Twisted through More Damn Traffic to Get HereÑfurther underscore a contemporary Western sensibility. RuschaÕs interest in what the real West has becomeÑand HollywoodÕs version of itÑplays out across his oeuvre. The cinematic sources of his subject matter can be seen in his silhouette pictures, which often appear to be grainy stills from old Hollywood movies. They feature images of the contemporary West, such as parking lots and swimming pools, but also of its historical past: covered wagons, buffalo, teepees, and howling coyotes. Featuring essays by Karin Breuer and D.J. Waldie, plus a fascinating interview with the artist conducted by Kerry Brougher, this stunning catalogue, produced in close collaboration with the Ruscha studio, offers the first full exploration of the painterÕs lifelong fascination with the romantic concept and modern reality of the evolving American West. Published in association with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Exhibition dates: de Young, San Francisco: July 16ÐOctober 9, 2016

"Rather than the proverbial melting pot, Wilson asks us to recognize a West that is at least a place where, against a backdrop of aridity and expansive space, diverse lives can and do coexist." --John Rohrbach Renowned photographer Laura Wilson has captured the majesty, as well as the tragedy, of her home region of Texas and the wider West for more than three decades. A former assistant to Richard Avedon, she has published her work to wide acclaim over the past twenty-five years. As seen in this extraordinary book, Wilson's subjects range from legendary West Texas cattle ranches to impoverished Plains Indian reservations to lavish border-town cotillions. Also featured are compelling portraits of artists who are associated with the region, including Donald Judd, Ed Ruscha, and Sam Shepard. The unforgettable images in That Day, most of which are previously unpublished, tell sharply drawn stories of the people and places that have shaped, and continue to shape, the nation's most dynamic and unyielding land. Text from Wilson's journals accompanies the photographs, recalling her personal experiences behind the camera at the moment when a particular image was captured. With her incisive eye, Wilson casts a fresh light on the West--a topic of enduring fascination.

The extraordinary story of the artists who propelled themselves to international fame in 1960s Los Angeles Los Angeles, 1960: There was no modern art museum and there were few galleries, which is exactly what a number of daring young artists liked about it, among them Ed Ruscha, David Hockney, Robert Irwin, Bruce Nauman, Judy Chicago and John Baldessari. Freedom from an established way of seeing, making, and marketing art fueled their creativity, which in turn inspired the city. Today Los Angeles has four museums dedicated to contemporary art, around one hundred galleries, and thousands of artists. Here, at last, is the book that tells the saga of how the scene came into being, why a prevailing Los Angeles permissiveness, 1960s-style, spawned countless innovations, including Andy Warhol's first exhibition, Marcel Duchamp's first retrospective, Frank Gehry's mind-bending architecture, Rudi Gernreich's topless bathing suit, Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider, even the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Doors, and other purveyors of a California style. In the 1960s, Los Angeles was the epicenter of cool.

The Western is the quintessential American epic--a mythic story of nation building, triumphs, failures, and fantasies. This book accompanies the first major exhibition to examine the Western genre and its evolution from the mid-1800s in fine art, film, and popular culture, exploring gender roles, race relations, and gun violence--a story that is about more than cowboys and American Indians, pursuits and duels, or bandits and barroom brawls. From 19th-century landscape paintings by Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Remington to works by Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, and Kent Monkman; from the legends of "Buffalo Bill" Cody and Billy the Kid to John Ford's classic films and Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns and recent productions by Quentin Tarantino, Ang Lee, and Joel and Ethan Coen, The Western observes how the mythology of the West spread throughout the world and endures today.

Schwartz examines Ruscha's diverse body of work, including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, books, and films, and discusses his relationship with other artists with whom he sparked the movement known as West Coast pop.

Incandescent and celebratory paintings of cherry blossoms from Damien Hirst, in a glorious oversize volume With 107 new works, Cherry Blossoms marks a new chapter in Damien Hirst's career-long exploration of the physical relationship between artist and canvas that began with his Spot Paintings in 1986. Hirst describes his cherry blossoms as garish and messy and fragile"; the series signals a shift in Hirst's career away from minimalism and "the imagined mechanical painter" toward a painting that delights in the potential haphazardness of the medium, as well as the artist's own fallibility as a creator. Rich in color and striking in number, Hirst's Cherry Blossoms are both an appropriation and a tribute to the pictorial art of the 19th and 20th centuries. Damien Hirst (born 1965) rose to prominence in the 1990s as one of the Young British Artists, garnering attention for his controversial site-specific pieces. A 1989 graduate of Goldsmiths College, Hirst was awarded the Turner Prize in 1995. Now one of the contemporary art world's most famous figures, Hirst continues to surprise audiences with a staggering diversity of work, ranging from sculpture and painting to installation and performance art. In 2012, a retrospective of his nearly 30-year career was staged at Tate Modern. Hirst is represented by Gagosian.

Under the seminal direction of Irving Blum, Ferus Gallery quickly became one of the leading galleries on the West Coast, showing important and groundbreaking works--including Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans, Roy Lichtenstein's Drowning Girl, and Ed Ruscha's Los Angeles County Museum on Fire--and helping to launch the American Pop movement. The book was first published on the occasion of the 2002 exhibition of the same name at Gagosian's Chelsea gallery. A timeline documenting the Ferus gallery's history opens the fully illustrated catalogue, followed by an interview with Irving Blum by Roberta Bernstein and a critical discussion of Warhol's Campbell's soup can paintings by Kirk Varnedoe. This hardcover edition is 148 pages, with 93 color and 67 black-and-white reproductions, including evocative documentary photography by Dennis Hopper.