Ed Ruscha’s singular art has recorded the shifting emblems of American life in the form of Hollywood logos, stylized gas stations, and archetypal landscapes since the 1960s. His wry choice of words and phrases mines the perpetual interplay between language as a physical thing and language as a conceptual medium.

In 1993, Ruscha received a commission from the Denver Mayor’s Office of Art, Culture and Film to create a work for Michael Graves’ new Denver Central Library that would result in an epic mural 130 yards long unfolding across seventy panels and spanning the entire length of the atrium. Buffalo/Bird Study II is one of the preparatory works directly related to the Denver commission. Ruscha described it as a “rolling historical landscape” of Colorado and the West. In preparing for the commission, Ruscha read extensively about the history of Colorado’s Native Americans, which led him to think of voices from the past. For this large and colorful commission, where the panels would be seen at a distance—both across, above, and below where it was installed—the combination of anamorphic images and reverse stenciled white notations of voice prints become vertical images that run throughout the mural.

According to the artist, in Buffalo/Bird Study II the voice prints equate to one and a half seconds of a stampede and a bison’s guttural snorts and sneezes, and reminded him of dripping paint. The vertical notations, transposed by computer and stenciled over the image, suggest recordings of the trill of the lark (the Colorado State Bird).