It was the dead of winter in 2006, and James Frey was in a bad way.

His best-selling memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” had recently come under fire in the national media for factual inaccuracies. He had just appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to defend his work, and Oprah, once a fervent Frey supporter, had torn the author into a billion little shreds.

It seemed that everywhere Frey looked –on blogs and talk shows, in newspapers and magazines –someone was gleefully waiting to vilify him.

Others of lesser conviction might have fled to the hills of New Hampshire or Vermont to become J. D. Salinger-esque recluses, never to set foot in the public spotlight again. But Frey was never much for convention. In his time of need, instead of seeking refuge in alcohol or drugs or even therapy, the embattled author turned to the art of Ed Ruscha.

“I’ve had odd professional experiences,” Frey said on a recent visit to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. And after the odd professional experience that was Frey’s messy evisceration on “Oprah,” Frey’s French publisher called to console him after what she called his “public stoning.” The phrase stuck in Frey’s mind.

“When all that stuff was happening, I don’t know why, I was like, ‘I’ve got to get Ed Ruscha to paint me a picture that says ‘Public Stoning,’” Frey said.

The painting Frey commissioned from Ruscha now hangs in the Albright-Knox as part of “Wall Rockets,” a sprawling tribute exhibition inspired by the work of the legendary California artist. It runs through Oct. 25.

Humor and defiance

People come to Ruscha for many reasons. For Frey, Ruscha’s work contains a kind of sublime humor and defiance. Visual artists gravitate toward Ruscha’s use of unorthodox materials, like blood and gunpowder, his curious use of perspective or, perhaps most profoundly, his mysterious use of printed words in his paintings. All those reasons, and dozens more, are on view in the exhibition, which provides a window onto Ruscha’s cool-handed practice and its mammoth influence on subsequent generations of artists.

The majority of the show consists of recent works, many of them commissioned specifically for the exhibition, from top contemporary artists who owe serious debts to Ruscha’s work. They include long-established artists such as Cindy Sherman, John Baldessari, Richard Prince and the late Robert Mapplethorpe, along with dozens of mid-career and emerging artists.

With more than 85 participants, the show is nothing if not unwieldy. But given Ruscha’s eminence, it could easily have been five times as large and still not have penetrated the surface of his influence.

As the brainchild of collector and hedge-fund manager Glenn Fuhrman, “Wall Rockets” originated at the FLAG Art Foundation in New York City, where it was on view for more than eight months. At the Albright- Knox, the show is bolstered by more than a dozen works from the gallery’s permanent collection that serve to expand both the show’s historical reach and, organizers hope, its public appeal.

Quintessentially hip

The idea for the show originated several years ago with Fuhrman’s purchase of its namesake piece, “Wall Rockets,” from Ruscha. The artist, famously reticent about ascribing meaning to his work, told Fuhrman that the piece was a metaphor for a great work of art. Ruscha told Fuhrman that “great works of art shoot off the wall like a rocket.”

“To me, it was a metaphor for a collector,” Fuhrman said. “We’re all looking for wall rockets, and what I think is a wall rocket may not be what you think is a wall rocket.” So Fuhrman went on a wide-ranging hunt for “wall rockets” that somehow pointed back to Ruscha’s groundbreaking work. And what he soon found, unsurprisingly, was unbridled enthusiasm from artists far and wide.

“It was incredible how broad and far-reaching Ed’s connection is to contemporary artists,” Fuhrman said. “It was definitely so great that artists felt such a connection to Ed and at the same time wanted to make new work because this is something so resonant.”

Frequent visitors to the Albright- Knox are probably already familiar with Ruscha’s 1963 oil painting “Electric,” an iconic blue canvas with the word “ELECTRIC” printed in capital letters with a yellow-to-orange gradient. The piece evokes equal shares of derision and reverence among viewers, some of whom see it as a mere exercise in graphic design.

Others, like the organizers of the exhibition, see it as an early encapsulation of Ruscha’s groundbreaking approach of mixing the kitsch and accessibility of pop art with the near-obsessive simplicity of minimalism. As a case in point, Karl Lagerfeld, the fashion designer, claims “Electric” as a favorite painting.

Ruscha, 71, is a rare artist who has been able to maintain his ineffable appeal among the cultural cognoscenti (hence followers like Lagerfeld, Frey and other A-listers) while remaining accessible to large audiences of defiantly non-elite viewers. His work, which ranges from a series of revered books of photographs on the commercial landscapes of Southern California to his peculiar use of words and phrases in his paintings, has always carried something ineffably cool about it.

Like the trumpet playing of Miles Davis, or, as the critic Dave Hickey wrote, the late West Coast jazzman Chet Baker, Ruscha’s work has a stylistic ease and allure that no other visual artist has been able to reproduce. He is, for painters, the quintessence of hip.

“Ed’s like the coolest guy in the world. Literally, in my opinion, the coolest man on the face of the planet,” Frey said. “He makes the coolest art. It’s funny, it’s smart, it’s sophisticated, it’s aesthetically beautiful. The first time I met him was with my wife and we were just hanging out, and he’s totally mellow, easy-going, funny. He’s great-looking. My wife was like, ‘I sort of want to sleep with him.’ And I was like, ‘Well, for him, it’s OK.’ ”

‘The Night You Left’

For Nir Hod, an Israeli-born artist, his painting “The Night You Left” shares a certain sense of loneliness with Ruscha’s work. The piece, four long streaks resembling lines of cocaine on a black mirror, is titled “The Night You Left.” Hod talked about the painting as a a reflection on memory and beauty.

“It’s not about the cocaine, it’s more about the title, ‘The Night You Left,’ because ‘The Night You Left’ is a beautiful title. It’s something so romantic, but at the same time it captures something tragic. I like this combination of beauty and tragedy, or something very socializing and very high-lifestyle and very decadent. But at the same time there’s something very lonely about it, there’s something very sad with this title.”

Listen to artist Nir Hod talk about his piece, "The Night You Left"

Robert Lazzarini, who has two pieces in the show, was inspired by Ruscha’s “Stains” series, which used material like blood and gunpowder to create pieces with slightly disturbing overtones. In his sculpture of a gun stretched as if it were skewed in Photoshop, Lazzarini drew on Ruscha’s anamorphic paintings, in which he stretched and skewed words and images to create strange and difficult-to-decipher images.

Of course, Ruscha’s influence doesn’t stop in the high-falutin’ art-world circles of Los Angeles, where he lives, or New York City, long the center of the contemporary art universe. It trickles all the way upstate to Buffalo. More specifically, it filters, in its way, to artists like A. J. Fries, an accomplished Buffalo-based painter whose work belongs to several local collections.

In a recent trip through the gallery to check out “Wall Rockets,” Fries, who is feverishly finishing a series of paintings for a show at Hallwalls in November, was like a kid in a candy shop. Or, judging by the way he was literally sniffing the fumes from a Will Cotton painting called “Insatiable,” maybe more like an addict on a bender.

“God, they’ve got to be careful. I’m stealing that thing, I’m walking off with it,” Fries said, entranced by the piece. “It still smells like oil.”

Fries once painted a large-scale self-portrait (which a Toronto art critic mistakenly interpreted as a portrait of former Vice President Dick Cheney), with Guinness Oatmeal Stout and Yellowtail Shiraz. That’s directly owing, he said, to Ruscha’s use of coffee, blood, gunpowder and other uncommon substances, a tactic that also shows its somewhat sinister head in the work of Lazzarini.

A wide-angle view

Artists like Fries and J-M Reed, a local photographer who also counts Ruscha as an influence, depend on exhibitions at the Albright-Knox to draw inspiration for their work, which can’t help but reverberate into smaller galleries and exhibitions around Western New York. Fries seemed, in the short span of 40 minutes or so, to gain a refreshed perspective on his art.

“I saw like nine paintings that I couldn’t even dream of doing,” he said.

But Fries also caught a glimpse of paintings by Nir Hod, Peter Cain and McDermott & McGough, which had a clear affinity with his own current project and prompted him to reflect on his own painting process.

“This actually makes me feel really good. I’ve been struggling with all this stuff,” Fries said, examining Cain’s black and white painting of a Dodge Charger. “I have a tendency to try to make my stuff way too perfect, and then to see this, I have to remember that I work in a completely ass-backwards way than anybody else does.”

For curator Lisa Dennison, who winnowed down Fuhrman’s selection of artists for the show for its run at FLAG in New York City, the Albright-Knox incarnation of the show is an opportunity to give the public a more wide-angle view of Ruscha and his legions of disciples.

“Most people who are seeing the show may not know Ed Ruscha, but here you have a different dimension by having ‘Electric’ and the works on paper. It really helps enhance [the show],” Dennison said. “The point is that it’s great to be able to think about this collection, and to bring more works of Ruscha in, which I think helps the public, but also gives it a meaning.”

Fuhrman agrees. “It’s just very accessible to everybody and you don’t have to have this whole education to understand what the meaning is,” Fuhrman said. “That’s one of the things that I’m excited about, just bringing people to see contemporary art that might not otherwise have an opportunity to see it.”