At first, Ed Ruscha’s collaboration with the Los Angeles-based boutique chocolatiers andSons might seem like an unusual pairing. Until, that is, you remember that Ruscha is the creator of the fragrant, ephemeral Chocolate Room installation from 1970, which was more recently re-created for his retrospective “Ed Ruscha / Now Then” at the Museum of Moden Art (2023) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2024).
The original Chocolate Room was created for the American pavilion at the 35th Venice Biennale. Back then, Ruscha used tubes of Nestlé chocolate paste and screen printed 360 sheets of paper, which were used to cover the pavilion walls. For the MoMA and LACMA versions of this piece, the Sun Valley print shop La Paloma Fine Arts (which has installed all but the original iteration of the Chocolate Room) used a dark Callebaut chocolate as the “pigment.”
Why chocolate? “I was a little bit tired of making conventional pictures,” Ruscha told the New York Times, referring to the impetus for the original Chocolate Room. “And so I thought I would use unconventional materials.”
The chocolate in Ruscha’s andSons bar is more bespoke. The bar is molded to form the topography of California’s Central Valley, the interior expanse of the state known for its agriculture. It utilizes three ingredients: Peruvian dark chocolate, sea salt from Tomales Bay, an inlet north of San Francisco, and blood orange olive oil from a ranch in Sonoma County.
The bar is packaged in an orange box within a larger cloth-wrapped box. On the lid is a reproduction of Ruscha’s 1971 lithograph Made in California. andSons is producing 300 bars, which will be available for purchse for $295 each, starting in early December.
