LACMA’s Balch Art Research Library serves museum staff, visiting researchers, and the public by collecting and preserving a diverse collection of 240,000 art historical research materials. Our series Artists in Situ: Selections from LACMA’s Artist Files highlights our extensive collection of artist and gallery Ephemera, a subset of which is digitized and accessible online.
The files are made up of printed ephemera such as postcards, press releases, brochures, clippings, and posters related to an individual artist and their work. These archival materials have the capacity to provide insight into public perception surrounding artists’ works, and they can afford researchers a nuanced perspective of the historical art market. They are also often of artistic value in themselves, and often shed light on artists’ relationships to commerce and material ephemerality.
In conjunction with LACMA’s current exhibition ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, on view in BCAM through October 6, we're sharing selections from Ruscha’s artist file that highlight his long-standing relationship with Southern California institutions.
