Motor City by Ed Ruscha (2009) is a portfolio of seven colour aquatints, each one centred on a single automotive badge or emblem rendered against a pale, almost clinical ground. The seven prints together catalogue the heraldry of mid-century American car manufacture: a Studebaker shield, a stylised 7 in a gold ring, a Cadillac crest, a Ford badge in red and blue, the Bel Air script in cursive chrome, a Chrysler Corporation emblem with its industrial knight, and the Chevrolet bowtie in yellow and blue. Each emblem is isolated, centred, treated with the same flat attentiveness Ruscha brought to petrol stations forty years earlier.

The choice of subject connects directly to the world Ruscha grew up in. The American automobile industry of the 1940s and 1950s produced not just vehicles but an entire mythology of mobility, aspiration, and national identity — the annual model changes, the fins and chrome, the brand loyalty that ran through families like a bloodline. Detroit at its peak employed hundreds of thousands of workers and exported the American dream in steel and sheet metal to every corner of the country. By 2009, when this portfolio was made, the city had filed for the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history, the industrial infrastructure that had built those badges largely dismantled, the brands themselves restructured or absorbed. General Motors received a federal bailout the same year.

Ruscha brings to these corporate emblems the same neutral curiosity he brought to road signs and petrol station canopies — treating them as archaeological objects, the heraldry of an industrial civilisation. The bowtie, the crest, the script: each one a small monument to an America that believed it would manufacture its way to permanence, rendered in aquatint with the careful attention of someone who understands that what a culture chooses to put on its cars is at least as revealing as what it puts on its buildings.

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