Route 66 turns 100 this year, and Artnet's centennial survey traces the highway through John Steinbeck's prose, Bob Dylan's paintings, and Ed Ruscha's photographs. The survey is good. But it stops short of the interesting question: what does it mean that a highway became an archive, and who decided what got archived?
Ed Ruscha and the Art of the American Road
Ruscha photographed every building on the Sunset Strip and every gas station on Route 66 not because they were beautiful but because they were there and would not always be. The work is documentary disguised as aesthetics, or aesthetics that only works because it's documentary. In conversation with Andrew McClintock, Ruscha talks about words and LA and the internet with the same flat affect he brought to those gas stations: things are interesting because they exist, and then they stop existing, and the image is what remains. That's not nostalgia. That's archival practice with good typography.
Route 66 at 100 and Who Gets to Tell the Road
The Artnet piece focuses on the artists who mythologized Route 66. The myth is largely white, largely male, largely about escape. The actual highway bisected Black communities, displaced Indigenous land, and built its mythology on the backs of populations it bypassed economically. The Queens costureras project covered by Hyperallergic this week, immigrant women sewing counter-maps of their own geographies, is the formal opposite of Ruscha's gas stations: same archival impulse, completely different subject position. The road goes where power decides it goes. The archive records who was standing on it. Both projects are asking: whose map is this, and who gets to make the next one? A 2023 paper in American Art by Braddock found that highway-themed American art of the mid-century systematically omitted sundown town geography from its frame. The centennial is a good moment to notice that omission is also a compositional choice.