Episode No. 772 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features art historians Zanna Gilbert and Andrew Perchuk; and curator Meg Linton, museum director Taras Matla, and associate museum director Steve Comba.

Along with Emily Pugh, Gilbert and Perchuk are the project leads for “Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles,” a Getty Research Institute project that has, among other things, digitized Ed Ruscha’s five-decade-long photographic project to document the streets of Los Angeles. The GRI project also considers Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles archive within a range of historical frameworks, spotlights what it tells us about modern and contemporary art, architecture, and the physical, social, and cultural geographies of Los Angeles.

GRI-produced websites include:

• “Artist, Image, Archive, City,” a free digital book featuring visualizations, essays, images and more (the book is also available in free PDF and EPUB formats);
• “12 Sunsets,” which features Ruscha’s famed photos of the Sunset Strip, including how the street has changed over the last 50 years;
• The Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles Archive at the GRI;
• Research Collections Viewer for Ruscha’s photographs of Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard;
• Research Collections Viewer for Ruscha’s photographs of (other) Los Angeles streets;
• Digitized images from the collection.

On the second segment, we discuss the dispersal of artist Steve Roden’s estate with curator Meg Linton, who has advised the estate, University of Maryland Art Gallery director Taras Matla, and Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College associate director Steve Comba. Roden was a Los Angeles-area-based artist who worked in sound, sculpture, painting, and other media, who passed away in 2023 at the age of 59. The Roden estate has recently dispersed works to museums all over the United States, including those represented on this week’s program, as well as to the Grunwald Center at the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, Ruby City, San Antonio, and more. Roden created sound for The MAN Podcast in 2011.

Air date: August 20, 2026.