Mañana (2009), from Ruscha’s On the Road exhibition

“The only people for me are the mad ones,” Jack Kerouac famously declared in his loosely autobiographical novel, On the Road, beckoning readers to take to the open road and seek out “the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn….” Artist Ed Ruscha is just one of the many devoted fans who took Kerouac’s proviso to heart. But when he was first passed a copy of On the Road shortly after its 1957 publication, its author’s fevered travels came as less of an epiphany than an affirmation: “I read that and I felt like, Wow! This is very much what I’m already doing!” Ruscha recalls with a chuckle.

Indeed, in 1954, at the tender age of 16, Ruscha had already set off hitchhiking from his Oklahoma City hometown without much of a plan beyond spending the summer in South Florida. “It took 26 rides to get to Miami, and it took 26 rides to get back,” he says matter-of-factly. In between, he landed jobs as a busboy at restaurants a few blocks from the ocean and seemingly a galaxy away from Oklahoma. The work was hardly glamorous, but Ruscha says that horizon-expanding summer—from exploring the Everglades to the anything-but-buttoned-down surfside scene—made it clear that his future was neither in the Midwest nor in his father’s insurance trade.

Two years later, immediately after graduating high school, Ruscha lit out for Los Angeles and enrolled in the first art school that would accept him, Chouinard Art Institute. The rest, as the saying goes, is (art) history. Present-day critics consider him the progenitor of “California Cool,” as well as the West Coast’s answer to Andy Warhol. The art market heartily agrees: Sales of his paintings have fetched more than $21 million at auction in the last 12 months alone. (And that’s not even counting the private sales brokered by his dealers at the heavyweight Gagosian Gallery.)

On that note, call his new show at North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art an aesthetic homecoming: Ruscha’s On the Road exhibition marries imposing landscapes with choice snippets of prose from Kerouac’s signature novel. “That book has always been important to me,” he explains. “I just needed an excuse to go back to it. I was doing paintings of mountaintops, and I began to see them as fractions of scenery—as though you would spot them driving down the road. I already had some favorite statements that are verbatim from the book, things I had marked that I wanted to spotlight. It all fell into line.”