Richard Prince: Canal Zone Poster

This poster reproduces Graduation (2008), a work from Richard Prince's Canal Zone series, produced in 2014 for Richard Prince: Canal Zone at Gagosian's Madison Avenue gallery in New York (May 8–June 14, 2014).

The Canal Zone paintings combine paint with photographs appropriated from other photographers' work, most notably Patrick Cariou's images of Rastafarians in Jamaica. The series became the subject of the copyright case Cariou v. Prince, which tested the legal limits of appropriation art. Graduation shows Prince's layering of collaged photographic fragments with loosely painted additions.

Prince (b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone) has worked since the late 1970s by rephotographing and recontextualizing images from advertising, pulp fiction, and mass media, questioning the conventions of authorship and originality. Canal Zone remains one of the more contested chapters in that project, and its Gagosian exhibition placed the series within the gallery's long representation of his work.