Ruscha's relationship with etching runs through his entire relationship with Crown Point Press, the San Francisco studio founded in 1962 by Kathan Brown, a printmaker widely credited with reviving etching as a serious contemporary medium at a moment when it had largely fallen out of fashion. Brown built the Press's reputation working with major American artists of the postwar period, including Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud, before it grew into one of the most significant print workshops in the country, hosting figures such as Chuck Close, Sol LeWitt, John Cage and Kiki Smith over the following decades. Ruscha's own involvement dates back to 1982, and by 2014 he had produced enough work there for Crown Point to mount a full retrospective, Made in San Francisco, surveying thirty years of his etchings in a single exhibition and accompanying catalogue.
That sustained, decades-long relationship with one studio sets etching apart from the wider spread of publishers and techniques across Ruscha's career, most of his other print projects tied to a specific one-off collaboration rather than a continuous practice returning to the same workshop again and again. Etching itself carries a particular weight within printmaking history, a technique largely unchanged since Rembrandt, and Ruscha's decision to keep returning to it across four decades places his own practice in direct conversation with that older tradition, even as the subject matter, language pulled from roadside America, stayed distinctly his own. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco now hold Ruscha's complete graphic archive, several hundred editioned prints and working proofs, a body of work that continues to expand as new editions from Crown Point are added.
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