Richard Prince: Folk Songs

This book was published on the occasion of Richard Prince: Folk Songs at Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York. The exhibition featured a body of paintings, drawings, and collages produced from 2018 to 2023, along with five sculptures dating from 2007 to 2025. In Prince’s words, the works in Folk Songs picture “hobo smokestack buckteeth and scarred upper lips exhaling chimney clouds of Lucky Strikes drifting over broken-down houses sitting in fields of exaggerated flowers, thousand-yard stares, cardboard caskets, and Mt. Rushmore weeds.”

The catalogue—which features a die-cut reproduction of one of the exhibited paintings stapled to its cover—reproduces all the works in the exhibition with color plates, details, and installation photography. An essay by art historian Sydney Stutterheim places Prince’s idiosyncratic motifs and methods in context, examining his manipulation of reality through self-reference and appropriation, buried meanings and apocrypha.