Edward Ruscha is an American artist who works with various media and spent most of his career in Los Angeles. His sources of inspiration vary from the collages of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns to commercial images and Pop art. Many of his photographs depict American urban and suburban landscapes. From the late 1960s, Ruscha was innovative in his materials, using everything from gunpowder to blood. His works incorporating words are some of his most famous, and along with his photographs often characterised by subtle humour. In 1982, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organised a travelling retrospective of his work.