(RED) and Gagosian team up with Ed Ruscha for second, limited-edition scarf to fight AIDS & COVID-19

NEW YORK – Today, (RED) and Gagosian announced they are teaming up again with revered American artist Ed Ruscha on a special limited-edition winter cashmere-blend scarf that will help fight the AIDS and COVID-19 pandemics. 

The scarf, which is based off of Ruscha’s Science is Truth Found Out (1986) drawing, is produced in Italy by Massif Central. A limited edition of 500 scarfs are available, each signed and numbered. The scarf is priced at $1,200 and is available for preorder beginning today – and shipping by December 1 – online and in Gagosian’s New York and London shops. Doubling the impact, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will match every dollar raised for the Global Fund.

The collaboration builds on the successful, sold-out spring limited-edition silk twill scarf which raised over $1 million for global health, enabling the Global Fund to provide life-saving tools like over 100,000 face masks and PPE for medical staff, 150,000 COVID tests, and training for over 1,000 community health workers.

 “AIDS isn’t a disease of the past, it’s a crisis now. And COVID-19 has only made matters worse. If we want to stop current and future pandemics and end the injustice of global health emergencies, we need to engage everyone – and that includes the art community,” said Jennifer Lotito, President and COO of (RED). “We are so grateful to Ed for his generosity and are thrilled that he has once again offered his beautiful artwork for a winter edition of the scarf. This exciting collaboration will deliver life-saving cash and heat to help make preventable and treatable disease preventable and treatable for everyone, everywhere.” 

More than three decades ago, Ruscha made the drawing Science Is Truth Found Out, inspired by a phrase he saw inscribed in stone above the entrance to the science block of Los Angeles’s storied Hollywood High School. Taking this aphorism, he redrew the letters against softly silhouetted trees in a field of glowing red. Today, this striking image is available in the form of a sumptuous cashmere blend scarf—to be worn or simply contemplated.

In the current global political climate, where suspicion and demonization of science and medicine has been widespread, Ruscha’s prescient image has gained new resonance and topicality. In the processes of revelation in the often circuitous path toward truth, science and scientific thinking intersect with art—probing and searching intellectually and philosophically while seeking material consequences and outcomes. Like the most elegant of scientific theories, Ruscha’s images and idioms are at once irreducibly straightforward and heroically expansive.

(RED) and Gagosian have worked alongside Sotheby’s with artists and designers since 2008 on a series of high-profile auctions to raise funds and awareness to help end AIDS. Their efforts have delivered over $78 million to the fight.

Ed Ruscha

Throughout his storied career, Ed Ruscha has developed a lexicon of distinctively American images, words, and signs that imbue his paintings, drawings, prints, and books with a wry semiotic wit and cool visual style. Born in Nebraska in 1937, he moved from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles in 1956, where he attended the Chouinard Art Institute. From the outset, Ruscha called himself an “abstract artist . . . who deals with subject matter.” Abandoning academic connotations that came to be associated with Abstract Expressionism, he looked instead to advertising and popular media and brought words—as form, symbol, and material—to the forefront of painting. His word paintings, often drawn from his immediate surroundings, explore the noise, fluidity, and often mystifying nature of language. As the shape of the word becomes an image, the visual, verbal, semantic and semiotic intertwine. Through his formal experimentations and transformative use of the American vernacular, Ruscha continues to influence generations of artists worldwide.

Gagosian

Established by Larry Gagosian in Los Angeles in 1980, Gagosian is a global gallery specializing in modern and contemporary art with nineteen locations across the United States, Europe, and Asia. In addition to its galleries, Gagosian is at the forefront of the digital marketplace with innovative online viewing rooms, and initiatives including the Artist Spotlight online platform. The gallery has long developed cultural programming and events with artists, including performances, exhibition tours, public talks, film screenings, and studio visits, both in person and digitally through the Gagosian Premieres film series. Gagosian’s extensive in-house publishing program has produced nearly six hundred books, including catalogues raisonnés, artist monographs, scholarly exhibition catalogs, and limited editions, and a celebrated print and online magazine—Gagosian Quarterly—which recently celebrated its fifth anniversary. Complementing the gallery’s worldwide programming, the Gagosian Shop curates a coveted selection of rare books, art editions, unique collaborations, posters, jewelry, and apparel online, as well as at its physical retail spaces in New York on Madison Avenue and London in the historic Burlington Arcade.

Massif Central

Established in 2013, Massif Central produces limited-edition scarves by contemporary artists. Inspired by the trajectory of traditional French silk scarf-making, the New York based company takes its name from the region in France where the art form originated.

CONTACT: Press@red.org