University of Pittsburgh Library System

The Frick Fine Arts Library collection holds nine artist books made by the Los Angeles-based artist Ed Ruscha. For her ASRA project, Grace Marston curated a mini exhibition in the Frick Fine Arts Library which investigated how these books correspond to Ruscha’s larger body of work. Although Ruscha has made a name for himself as a painter whose vibrant works explore the power of fonts and language, his books tend to primarily contain black-and-white photographs with minimal amounts of text. However, some of his books do contain word art in the forms of signs, album covers, or bleach-stained linen. To provide additional context for the exhibition, Marston also explored and displayed the contents of Artists & Photographs (1970), an editioned art collection published by Multiples, Inc. Artists & Photographs served as a portable exhibition in a box with contributions by nineteen American and European artists, including Ed Ruscha. Like Ruscha, many of the other artists who participated in the Artists & Photographs project did not primarily identify as fine art photographers, but rather as artists who use photography as an element in their practice. Through her study of Artists & Photographs, Marston discovered how Ruscha’s photobooks fit in with the larger photoconceptualist movement, in which artists rebelled against the established visual conventions of modern art photography. Of course, artist books are meant to be opened and perused, not confined to glass display cases. In order to provide the University of Pittsburgh community with greater access to Ruscha’s books, Marston hosted a pop-up event in which library visitors had the opportunity to handle and look through the books for themselves. At the conclusion of the semester, Marston wrote about her ASRA experience for the Department of History of Art and Architecture's blog, Constellations.