Originally from Oklahoma City, Ed Ruscha made the drive to and from Los Angeles many times in the 1950s and 1960s, the first time in 1956 with childhood friend and collaborator Mason Williams.  On these cross-country road trips, Ruscha began to notice the ubiquitous anonymity of gasoline stations, photographing them as a sort of pictorial travelogue.  Most of the photographs are taken from the perspective of the highway, with large areas of the foreground or road, which evolved into a book titled 26 Gas Stations.  Included in 26 Gas Stations is a photograph of Amarillo’s Standard Station, which evolved into a larger body of prints and paintings.

Included among Ruscha’s circle of friends was actor, photographer, and art collector Dennis Hopper.  Hopper’s 1961 photograph, also titled Double Standard, features a Standard gasoline station in Los Angeles.  A clever image choice for the exhibition posters for Ruscha’s first exhibition of gasoline station paintings in 1964, the photograph references many of Ruscha’s artistic interests at the time; wordplay, commercial signage, gas stations, and small fires.

Read more about the friendship and collaboration between Ruscha and Williams, including early sketches of Double Standard: http://www.aldenprojects.com/search?q=double+standard

See Ed Ruscha’s 1962 photograph Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/ed-ruscha-standard-station-amarillo-texas-8

See Dennis Hopper’s Double Standard photograph in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/125271

More than 30 years after Ruscha’s Double Standard, Elizabeth Yarosz-Ash combines watercolor, typography, collage, and images of houses floating across the foreground of the iconic gas station.  The houses are a recurring theme in Yarosz-Ash’s work, but in this image they assume the role of cars pulling up to the gas pumps, implying a transition from one place to another.  The placeless obscurity of the gas station, when combined with the title, Highway Robbery, leaves the viewer with a sense of disequilibrium or imbalance.

Born in Czechoslovakia, Jiri Anderle is a painter and graphic artist whose aesthetic recalls the sketches of Leonardo da Vinci.  Living in Prague in the midst of the Cold War, Anderle’s body of work from the 1970s consisted primarily of Vanitas, a series of etchings that questioned power and the ruling class through the recall of the aristocracy and old masters.

Borrowing imagery from David, in this etching Anderle overlaps multiple versions of Recamier’s profile in a fine, ghost-like line.  The multiplicity of the faces suggests suspended individual moments, expressions that engage with and speak to the viewer, yet are removed from the present moment.

A member of the New York School of the 1950s and 1960s, Grace Hartigan was “mesmerized and fascinated” by the power of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings when she first saw them in 1949 and began to incorporate similar elements into her own work.  Firmly based in Abstract Expressionism, Hartigan is unique in that she continued to draw from the visual world around her and never truly left representational painting, despite advice from critic Clement Greenberg and others.  Instead, Hartigan turned to previous figurative painters such as Rubens, Velasquez, and Goya as she worked to understand the figure and it’s place in the history of art.  This early exploration led to the development of the style that would inform the rest of her artistic career. 

Roger Shimomura was born in Seattle, Washington in 1939 and as a young child spent two years in Idaho in a concentration camp for Japanese Americans during WWII, where he experienced the xenophobia that was prevalent at the time.  Living in the Midwestern United States as a professor at the University of Kansas, and as an American-born citizen of Japanese descent, Shimomura was regularly asked questions such as “how long have you lived in the U.S.?” or “what part of Japan are you from?”  In an effort to explore these unconscious stereotypes, he combines elements of American culture with Asian traditions.  Borrowing imagery and aesthetics from traditional Japanese woodblock prints, such as those by Utagawa Kunisada, whose work is also found in the AMoA Permanent Collection, Shimomura contrasts traditional Japanese figures with contemporary Japanese-Americans.

Born in Venezuela, artist Arturo Correa moved to the United States in 1989 to study art and begin his career.  Correa’s father was a surgeon and his mother was a psychologist, and their debates about health and human behavior deeply influenced the artist’s work, encouraging him to offer a different way in which to view the world.

Infanta Sofia is one of 20 works created as part of his Celebrating Mythology series.  Informed by Venezuelan heritage and pre-Columbian culture, this panting borrows the shape of the title figures from Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas, creating a contemporary interpretation by flattening the form, removing perspective, and combining the historic figure with text.  Inscribed in the thick paint is the Spanish word “cuando” which translates to “when” in English, and can also serve as a commentary on the infanta’s ambiguous place in time.

Few paintings in art history have prompted as many questions or inspired as many artists as Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas.  The enigmatic group of characters can be found in Picasso’s 1957 painting The Maids of Honor (Las Meninas, after Velasquez), a cubist style recreation of the iconic work.  The shape of the central figure is also mimicked in Meninas, 2002, a series of three dimensional bronze sculptures by Manolo Valdez that grace the sidewalks of the art district of Bilboa, Spain.  Also inspired by Velasquez, Las Meninas by artist Simone Leigh uses terra cotta, raffia, and porcelain to address issues of race, beauty, and the female form as they relate to African traditions.

Explore Las Meninas, by Diego Velasquez, in the collection of Museo del Prado: https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/las-meninas/9fdc7800-9ade-48b0-ab8b-edee94ea877f

Compare Picasso’s The Maids of Honor (Las Meninas, after Velazquez) with the original by Velazquez: http://web.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/picasso/artworks/maids_of_honor

See Valdez’s Meninas on the streets of Bilboa: https://www.bilbaoturismo.net/BilbaoTurismo/en/outdoor-art/the-meninas

Valdez also works through the shapes in a series of two dimensional works: https://www.guggenheim-venice.it/en/art/artists/manolo-valdes/

Learn more about Simone Leigh’s Las Meninas in the galleries of the Cleveland Art Museum: https://www.clevelandart.org/art/2019.175