It’s amazing what one can come up with after a little bit of research.

I have the exhibition catalogues from Richard Prince’s exhibitions Super Group (shown at the Gallerie Max Hetzler in Berlin, from 16th September to 28th October 2017) and High Times (Gaagosian, New York, 1st November to 19th December 2018.) These include essays by Prince that explain some aspects of his record cover-related works. He obviously has a record collection and decided to make artworks of covers, starting with the nine Sonic Youth covers he happened to have in his collection. He fixed thm in a 3 x 3 format on canvas using paint as glue. Then he moved on to Kinks albums. He wanted to make a collage of sixteen Kinks albums but only had six so he went out anbought ten more! Next he collected eighty-seven Beatles albums, includung seventeen copies of Revolver! However, he doesn’t say how he used all these.

Prince got fascinated by records’ inner sleeves and betweewn 2015 and 2017 created a series of large format paintings/collages using record sleeves, black and white stuck to canvas and with group names and song tiotles as well as some “hippie” figures from his earlier series of Hippie paintings that had been noticed by High Times magazine that had used two on the covers of its September 2016 special trippy issue.

In 2016 A Tribe Called Quest were planning to release their first album since 2003 and the band’s lead rapper, Q-Tip (Kamaal Ibn John Fareed) approached Richard Prince to ask if he would design the cover. Q-Tip had obviously seen Prince’s Hippie paintings and wanted something in that style. However, at that time Prince was painting his Super Group paintings/collages using blank black or white recoird sleeves.

Prince visited the band in NewJersey and painted protraits of the four members, renedered in his Hippie painting style. The final cover design for the CD/double LP combined one of his Super Group collages with a Hippie-style portrait of one of the band.

You may remeber the set of nine “Pop” covers that Prince exhibited in 2022.

All the words on these covers seemed to releate to a particular music genre, with one exceprtion: Hippie. I wondered why Prince had chosen that and, having now read about his seeries of Hippie paintings, I realise where the Hippie probably came from as the style of these paintings is similar to the style of the Hippe works.