Richard Prince: T-Shirt Paintings: Hippie Punk

Richard Prince (born 1949) has a connoisseur's eye for American iconography, and an artist's knack for transforming that iconography into art forms: car hoods, signed photographs, adverts--and T-shirts. Casually stretched over frames to poke fun at the grandeur of the tautly stretched canvas, and messily painted or silkscreened, the T-shirts are more intimate in scale than much of Prince's recent work. They also offer a kind of mini-survey of his career, ranging in subject from jokes to abstractions to images of hippies or rock icons like Jimi Hendrix (one imagines the artist packing the T-shirts in a valise like Duchamp as a miniaturized retrospective). One series, done for the artist's daughter, tread less familiar terrain, with images of animal and flower drawings. Presented together in this volume for the first time, they affirm Prince's ongoing appropriation of the American vernacular.