New Cowboys

A limited-edition artist's publication (edition of 500) from Karma continuing Richard Prince's decades-long Cowboys project, in which the artist rephotographs the lone, anonymous, often weathered cowboy figure from cigarette advertisements and other mass-market American sources. This 24-page edition presents a new group of cowboy images that foreground the tears, scratches, and surface textures of Prince's source material — exposing the physical residue of the appropriated print as part of the picture itself. Prince's Cowboys works, begun in 1980, were among the foundational gestures of Appropriation Art and helped reframe rephotography as a critical practice rather than reproduction. Printed at a large 15¼ × 11½-inch trim, the publication functions as both an artist's edition and a distillation of Prince's continued investigation of the cowboy as American myth.