Richard Prince: American Prayer
exhibition catalogue
concept and book design
Artist Richard Prince is renowned for appropriating icons that capture the American cultural zeitgeist, such as Marlboro cowboys, femme fatale nurses, and muscle cars. An exhibition at the Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris, presented rare books selected by the artist from its collection alongside Prince’s artwork. Richard Prince: American Prayer, the accompanying exhibition catalogue, offered a rare glimpse into Prince’s intellectual explorations, revealing the source material for many of his well-known series through the pairing of literary excerpts and complementary illustrations of artwork.
design The framework for the design was a vast array of subjects (from Hells Angels and Planet of the Apes to Robert Crumb to Jack Kerouac) and types of material (essays, excerpts from first editions, film transcripts, song texts, collection images, artefacts, paintings, sculptures, jokes, car hoods and more. The main challenge for the design was to represent the entire contents and organize it without becoming repetitive.
client Gagosian, New York. Larry Gagosian opened his first gallery in Los Angeles in 1980, focusing on modern and contemporary art. Today, Gagosian has evolved into a global network with 16 exhibition spaces in the US, Europe and Far East.
reviews “Richard Prince: American Prayer is certainly one of the most beautiful and impressive books—in every sense—that I have had the pleasure of adding to my library in a very long time.”
– Nick Tosches, journalist, novelist, biographer, and poet (1949–2019)
“I love Richard Prince: American Prayer, which I gave to a friend of mine a while ago who was going through some very hard times, because it’s the kind of collection you could start looking at around 4 in the morning and get through ’til noon okay.”
– Jerry Stahl, novelist and screenwriter
collaborators
Bob Rubin, editor and essay
Marie Minssieux-Chamonard, essay
John McWhinnie, essay
articles & links
Richard Prince: American Prayer, store
