Richard Prince

Gagosian will present Family Tweets, a new book by Richard Prince published through Fulton Ryder. Works from the publication will be on view in the 976 Madison Avenue gallery behind the bookstore.

Family Tweets documents Prince’s project at Desert X in Southern California’s Coachella Valley in 2017. The site offered to Prince was an abandoned house in Desert Hot Springs, where he installed—inside and out—printouts from his Birdtalk blog relating to his family, most of which were posted on the @richardprince4 Twitter feed in 2014. The printouts were made in a variety of mediums.

Three days after the installation, once Prince had left, most of the works were removed, taken, seized—gobbled up, so to speak—by “art hikers with flashlights.” Neither he nor the organizers had any “remote viewing” about what would happen to the artworks after he left; there was never any thought about “guarding” them. It wasn’t exactly comme ci, comme ça, but let’s just say the whole project turned into one of those sixties free concerts—80 percent of the works disappeared. The works on view are examples of what was retrieved after the event was over.