Much has been written about Ed Ruscha’s publications. Milestones in the history of postmodern artists’ books, they marked a decisive shift towards industrial offset printing and helped establish the artist’s book as an inexpensive art form. Ruscha’s publications of the 1960s and early 1970s were conceived as conceptual propositions, characterised by the interplay of abundant imagery, minimal captions, and the use of “text-as-image” on their covers. Yet, as simple as they might seem in concept, each book underwent a yearlong gestation, as the artist confessed in a 1973 interview with Willoughby Sharp for Avalanche:

“When I did the books, I had a complete feeling of creation in the same sense that a woman would have a child. I even wrote that down: These books are my children.”

Published in a single edition of 4,065 copies, Colored People gathers 15 photographs of Californian desert vegetation, mostly cacti, stripped of their backgrounds. In terms of content, the book resonates with his earlier A Few Palm Trees (1971): “I guess at that time I was more involved in botanical phenomena”, the artist says in a conversation with Clive Phillpot for his catalogue raisonné (Éditions 1959–1999, Walker Art Center). Floating against the white page, the 15 plants create a rhythmic sequence before the book falls into sixteen blank double-spreads.

And in this void, there is plenty of space to reflect on its title. Is it a politically charged formula, or simply a sequel “in colour” to his previous black-and-white A Few Palm Trees, in which the fourteen anthropomorphic plants are looking east, straight at a “camera facing west on all photos”, followed by fifteen blank double-spreads? It might equally be that, with his tongue-in-cheek, characteristically specific irony, Ruscha anticipates by decades contemporary debates around colonial hierarchies and scientific racism. If that’s the case, his approach is remarkably conceptual – depicting no literal persons anywhere in the book – and allowing the metaphor to remain suspended in ambiguity. If we should embrace the racial underpinnings of the term “colored people”, Ruscha is very sharp in interrogating the social weight of the phrase:

“There are some graphic connections between what is stereotyped as a colored person, and a tropical plant. I even remember a [W.S.] Gilbert work called ‘King Borria Bungalee Boo’. There were illustrations in there of Africans that were bent over at the hips and made into strange shapes. That was just a fragment of the thinking of it,” elucidates the artist in a conversation with Phillpot.

His subtle reflection (a critique) took several years to be understood, and was further explored by Adrian Piper in 1991 and Blake J. Nolan, in collaboration with Matt Cohen and Sher Zabaszkiewicz, in 2008, in two reinterpretations that revive Ruscha’s title Colored People with what Smithsonian librarians describe as “varying degrees of directness”. However, the political charge of this particular book seems to have contributed to Ruscha’s decision to stop “making” books for a while:

“I don’t make books anymore. I feel that my statement has rounded itself off. And even though I have some motivation in that direction, I am keeping it all in the refrigerator just like they’ve kept Walt Disney. The books became a thing in themselves, almost an artwork. Their potency was diminished. That could have contributed to my stopping making them.” (Ruscha in an interview with Jana Sterbak for Real Life Magazine, Summer 1985.)

After that, Ruscha conceived books only in collaboration with other artists, such as Hard Light (1978), made with Lawrence Weiner. It was not until nearly three decades later that he returned to making an artist’s book on his own, with the sculptural ME and THE (2002).