Richard Prince: Upstate, Uptown

An eagerly awaited survey of Prince presents a striking collection of his most iconic works alongside rare, never-before-seen pieces from his groundbreaking career.

This is a major volume on the influential American artist Richard Prince, tracing more than four decades of his pioneering practice—from his early experiments in the late 1970s to some of his most recent works. Widely regarded as one of the most provocative figures in contemporary art, Prince has continually challenged ideas of authorship, originality, and cultural ownership, redefining how images circulate and acquire meaning in modern visual culture.

The book accompanies a landmark exhibition at Museo Jumex, the first major survey of the artist’s work presented in Latin America. The exhibition title echoes a joke Prince has returned to throughout his career—originally attributed to Milton Berle: “I went to my psychiatrist. He said, ‘Tell me everything.’ Now he’s doing my act.” Like the joke itself, Prince’s work operates through repetition, appropriation, and reinvention.

The volume explores two foundational threads in Prince’s practice: his pioneering “rephotography” of appropriated advertising imagery and his works based on jokes and cartoons. These themes unfold through in-depth presentations of his celebrated Cowboys and Jokes series, revealing how Prince has reshaped the visual language of popular culture for more than forty years. Alongside these bodies of work, the publication examines other key series that probe fiction, masculinity, and the mythology of American identity.

Richly illustrated and thoughtfully contextualized, this authoritative publication explores how Prince’s work reflects the ways in which commercial imagery both shapes and responds to a particular psychology of the United States in the twentieth century.

Eugenio López Alonso is the president of Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo. Kit Hammonds is Chief Curator at Museo Jumex in Mexico City. Rita Ackermann is a Hungarian-American artist known for her expressive paintings and drawings that explore identity, desire, and the psychological complexity of the human figure. Sydney Stutterheim is an art historian, curator, and writer whose research focuses on postwar and contemporary art.