The iconic artist Ed Ruscha has long been inspired by urban America – its cars, billboards, gas stations and low-slung houses all strung out in a seemingly endless sprawl. The short film below combines images from the Getty Research Institutes’s Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles Archive with audio of Ruscha reading LA-inspired passages from another major influence on his art, Jack Kerouac’s 1957 beat classic On The Road. Commissioned by the Getty Museum to mark Ruscha receiving the 2019 Getty Medal for contributions to the arts, the film by the US director Matthew Miller is a melancholic take on contemporary America.