Ed Ruscha and andSons craft $295 chocolate bar shaped like California

Ed Ruscha has spent decades playing with materials that weren't supposed to be art. In 1970, he filled a Venice Biennale pavilion with tubes of Nestlé chocolate paste, screen-printed across the walls like paint. Now, 54 years later, the pop artist is returning to chocolate — this time in collaboration with Los Angeles chocolatiers andSons on a limited holiday bar that costs $295.

The bar itself is molded into the topography of California's Central Valley, the agricultural heartland that runs through the state's interior. Inside: Peruvian dark chocolate, sea salt harvested from Tomales Bay north of San Francisco, and blood orange olive oil from Sonoma County. It's a chocolate bar that tastes like a specific place.

"I was a little bit tired of making conventional pictures, and so I thought I would use unconventional materials," Ruscha said about his original Chocolate Room installation. That restlessness — the refusal to stay in one medium — has defined his entire career. When MoMA and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art both mounted Ruscha retrospectives in 2023 and 2024, they recreated the Chocolate Room using dark Callebaut chocolate as pigment, proving the work had aged into something permanent.

This new collaboration takes that exploration somewhere more intimate. Instead of filling a room, you hold it in your hand. Each bar comes in an orange box nested inside cloth wrapping, with a reproduction of Ruscha's 1971 lithograph Made in California on the lid — a neat recursion, art about art about place about taste.

andSons is producing only 300 bars, available starting early December. At $295 each, this isn't chocolate as sustenance. It's a collectible, a taste experience, a small sculpture. Whether you eat it or keep it sealed matters less than the fact that Ruscha — now in his 80s — is still curious enough to ask what happens when you take something as ordinary as chocolate and treat it like it deserves to be.