The California artist Ed Ruscha, who resigned from the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, last year along with other artists to protest the institution’s leadership, has packed his trustee bags and headed north.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announced Thursday that Mr. Ruscha (pronounced roo-SHAY), who has had a long relationship with the museum, would take the one spot on its board reserved for an artist, for a term of three years. Mr. Ruscha, 75, becomes the fourth artist to serve as a trustee after the painter Robert Bechtle, the photographer Larry Sultan and the designer Yves Béhar.
The San Francisco museum is one of the few institutions in the world to have a complete collection of Mr. Ruscha’s highly influential artist books, which he began making in the 1960s, as well as paintings and other works by him. The museum also gave Mr. Ruscha his first retrospective at a public institution, in 1982.
Neal Benezra, the director of the museum, which is in the midst of a major renovation and expansion project and scheduled to reopen in 2016, said he believed Mr. Ruscha’s participation would “be invaluable as we dramatically expand to become an international showcase for the best in contemporary culture.â€
