Curator, Ana Torok: In the mid-1990s, Ruscha makes a series of paintings that feature blank rectangles but once you read the title, you realize that each mark corresponds to a word in the work’s title, and that the title itself is a menacing message.
Artist, Ed Ruscha: I began seeing these blank spaces as a means of kind of escaping the words that I’d been putting in pictures for so long.
Some of these works come from things I’ve read. One of these paintings, the wording came verbatim from a threat letter sent by some anonymous racist to Branch Rickey, who was the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, when he hired the first Black baseball player in the major leagues, Jackie Robinson. And it said something like, “We’ve found people like you in the river. One was just found last week.”
When you censor something like that, you’ve got this block and the block itself has a certain power to it.
Audio courtesy Acoustiguide and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago