Mark Ruwedel

Born in Pennsylvania, Mark Ruwedel is an artist/photographer currently living in Long Beach, California. He received his M.F.A. from Concordia University in Montreal in 1983 and taught there from 1984 to 2001; he is currently a Professor at California State University in Long Beach. He was awarded major grants from the Canada Council for the Arts in 1999 and 2001 and was given the Outstanding Faculty Award from Cal State, Long Beach, in 2010. Ruwedel has exhibited and published internationally for almost thirty years and his work is represented in museums throughout the world: Tate Modern; J. Paul Getty Museum; Los Angeles County Art Museum; Metropolitan Museum, New York; Yale Art Gallery; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Gallery of Australia; FNAC, France; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, among others. He was included in the National Gallery of Canada’s Biennial in 2012. Recent solo exhibitions include Gallery Luisotti, Santa Monica, 2013; Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, 2012; and Art 45, Montreal, 2012.

Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver, produced Written on the Land in 2002, a survey of ten years of his work, with an accompanying monograph, that travelled to nine additional venues across Canada. In 2008, the Yale University Art Gallery published Ruwedel’s monograph Westward the Course of Empire and in 2010, his artist’s book 1212 Palms. His most recent book, Pictures of Hell, will be published by Ram Publications and Alaska Press in Fall 2014.

Ruwedel has been photographing in the American deserts and other remote locations for twenty-five years now, pursuing epic-scaled projects on railroad construction, pre-Columbian sites, the landscapes of nuclear weapons, and, more recently, failed attempts to live in the harsh environment of the desert. He is currently photographing in and around Los Angeles.

“As a whole, Ruwedel’s work is both elegant and elegiac. He reminds us of the vast difference between the deep time of nature and the shorter span of cultural time. He also prods us to consider the meaning—and destiny—of our cultural footprint.” Keith Davis, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art.

Video Interviews:

TateShots:Mark Ruwedel

Exposed at Tate Modern: Mark Ruwedel