Stations Words | Bars Cars unites the creative visions of Ed Ruscha and Ron Cooper, two artists whose friendship was forged during one of California's most fertile artistic periods — both having studied at the Chouinard Art Institute. The open road, the play of light, and the sensation of moving through the vast American West are threads that run through both bodies of work. The exhibition also carries a celebratory spirit, marking one hundred years since Route 66 first stretched across the country, and Saturday evening (May 30) at 6:30pm CT at the Amarillo Museum of Art, a cocktail reception to open the exhibition will take place, followed by a gallery talk with artist Ron Cooper at 7pm.
Amarillo has long drawn artists into its orbit, but few images have lodged themselves so firmly in the American artistic imagination as Ruscha's depictions of a single Standard Station in that city. That station stands at a crossroads in every sense — geographic, cultural, and symbolic. Cooper, a key figure in Southern California's Light and Space movement, brings his own brand of spatial poetry: panels of transparent plexiglass coated in automotive pigments that shift in hue and intensity as viewers move around them. That experience of color transformed by motion feels especially at home in the sprawling, light-drenched expanse of the Texas Panhandle. Gathered together, Ruscha's prints exploring signage and language, Cooper's luminous panels, and four of Cooper's lovingly crafted vintage automobiles invite us to meditate on something deeply, distinctly American.
When Ed Ruscha was just beginning his career, he called himself an "abstract artist who deals in subject matter" — a description that captures his particular genius. Stepping away from the weight of Abstract Expressionism, he turned to the visual grammar of advertising, elevating words to the status of form, symbol, and material all at once. Wit and humor run beneath the surface of his work, which swings between sign and substance, finding unexpected grandeur in both the natural world and the built environment.
Ruscha left Oklahoma City for Los Angeles in 1956 to attend Chouinard. After graduating, years spent in advertising sharpened his eye for design, proportion, and perspective — instincts that would prove foundational to his painting and photography. In 1963, he published Twentysix Gasoline Stations, photographing stops along Route 66 between Los Angeles and his hometown, and launched a long engagement with the artist's book as a form. Every Building on the Sunset Strip, folded accordion-style, and a reimagining of Kerouac's On the Road in 2009 are among the works that followed. The book — painted, built, or transformed — has remained a touchstone of his thinking about language and how meaning is transmitted.
His paintings from the 1960s turn language itself into something physical and sonorous. A canvas bearing the word OOF practically demands to be read aloud. Ruscha's influence has spread worldwide, and his ongoing engagement with American vernacular continues to evolve as communication technologies shift beneath us. He represented the United States at the 51st Venice Biennale with Course of Empire, ten paintings in dialogue with Thomas Cole's celebrated cycle of the same name. His sweeping retrospective, ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, opened at MoMA in 2023 and traveled to LACMA the following year, drawing together more than six decades of landmark work.
Ron Cooper was born in New York City in 1943 and made his way to Chouinard in the early 1960s. Within a decade, his work had entered the permanent collections of the Guggenheim and LACMA, among others, and he had shown extensively in solo and group exhibitions around the world. Cooper belongs to the vanguard of California Light and Space artists who pushed beyond the physical limits of the art object, experimenting with the ways light and space act on human perception. In the 1990s, he relocated to Oaxaca, where he founded Del Maguey, the enterprise largely responsible for introducing artisanal mezcal to a global audience — work recognized with a James Beard Award in 2016. An ardent collector and competitor in vintage automobile racing, Cooper now lives and works in Taos, New Mexico.
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Where: Amarillo Museum of Art, 2200 South Van Buren, Amarillo, TX 79109
When: Saturday, May 30 at 6:30pm CT (reception) and 7:00pm (gallery talk)
How much: Free for AMOA members, $15 for non-members
For tickets: Click here
For more information, email amoa@actx.edu or call (806) 371-5050
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