Ruscha is largely associated with being a California artist, how did this show come to be held in Fort Worth?
Ed’s work has been followed and collected in Fort Worth since the late 1960s. He’s been here many times over the decades and had an important impact on a certain generation of Fort Worth culture. It’s a kind of mutual love affair between Ed and this city. In a number of ways, Fort Worth is a part of the rambling narrative of this show. After graduating from high school in 1956, Ed and his buddy Mason Williams (guitarist and song-writer of “Classical Gas”, 1966) got in Ed’s 1950 Ford and drove to L.A. They basically followed Route 66 through western Oklahoma, North Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and into the California basin. During Ed’s early years in L.A., he travelled back and forth between California and Oklahoma. These are the trips in which he took the early gasoline station photographs, which resulted in his famous book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations and a number of iconic Standard Stations paintings. They were pioneering examples of Pop art. Ruscha’s gas stations were consumer images that were in many ways as vivid as Warhol’s Soup Cans.

How does this show differ from other Ruscha exhibitions?
Ed works in many media and takes his ideas in a lot of directions. When you see a big Ruscha retrospective, it can be mind boggling. I wanted to work around a simple theme that would give a clear pathway through Ed’s work, from the very beginning to the present. The theme is the automobile and travel. When I really started to dig into the project, I realized how much Ed references road travel. It’s amazing that a show like this has never been put together before.