Pop artist Ed Ruscha just made California a little sweeter. Known for bold, graphic paintings that often incorporate text and Hollywood-inspired imagery, Ruscha is the inspiration for a dark chocolate bar, produced by andSons Chocolatiers, that riffs on his signature themes and style.
The chocolate bar is molded in the shape of a topographic section of California’s Central Valley, where the Santa Lucia Mountains meet the Pacific Ocean. Each bar will be packaged with a reproduction of Ruscha’s famous lithograph Made in California (1971). This artwork, first created as a poster for an exhibition at the UCLA Grunwald Graphic Arts Foundation, features the title printed over an orange color field. andSons, which is based in Beverly Hills, California, will produce 300 bars priced at $295 each, available this December.
Ruscha worked with chocolate 55 years ago when he staged his famous Chocolate Room (1970) installation for the 35th Venice Biennale. At the time, the artist was exploring different materials for his screenprinting practice. He stumbled upon tubes of Nestlé chocolate paste that reminded him of his oil paints, inspiring him to screenprint with chocolate on pieces of paper that he arranged on all four walls of a room.
The artist recently restaged Chocolate Room for his retrospective “ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN,” which was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 2023 and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2024.
