“With the hoods, I wanted to paint something that was already painted.”

—Richard Prince

Richard Prince’s Hoods series presents a vivid reflection of America’s enduring romance with the automobile—particularly the iconic muscle cars of the 1960s and 1970s—by transforming found car parts into evocative painted objects. Begun during an extended stay in California in 1987, the series evolved over the following 25 years, allowing the artist to deepen his exploration of the American psyche and expand his longstanding engagement with appropriation into the realm of three-dimensional sculptural form. Executed in 2005, What I Know stands as a striking, mature example of this significant body of work, which has been widely recognized and acquired by major international institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Pinault Collection, Paris. Melding painting, objecthood, and cultural critique, the work encapsulates many of the central preoccupations of Prince’s career—from the vernacular codes of popular culture to the strategies of reuse and recontextualization that have defined his practice since the late 1970s.

What I Know harkens back to Prince’s childhood: born in 1949, he came of age in the ‘60s, when the Beach Boys’ chart-topping hits helped elevate the muscle car into an icon of American youth culture. This cult status was solidified by Steve McQueen’s iconic car chase in Bullitt (1968), a sequence which transformed a Mustang GT into a symbol of raw strength and independence and became etched into the national imagination—as well as Prince’s. The artist later claimed that in 1972, he proposed to gain admission to the San Francisco Art Institute by offering to drive the faculty around the city in a Dodge Charger (“They didn’t go for it,” he clarified).ⁱ Indeed, Prince’s obsession with the iconography of the automobile even led him to construct a metal barn near his Catskills home dubbed the “Body Shop,” where his collection of vintage muscle cars today share space with other examples from the Hoods series. Like his earlier Cowboys series, these works channel a distinctly American vernacular rooted in speed, desire, escape, and the mythos of the open road. Mounted on the wall, What I Know highlights the bold contours of the cowl induction hood, a sculptural flourish that epitomized the distinctive styling of the era’s cars. In the broader cultural imagination, these vehicles came to represent the power and ambition of the postwar U.S.—a legacy that Prince channels here with visceral clarity.

“Vanishing Point. 1970 Dodge Challenger. Bullit. ’68 Mustang and ’68 Dodge Charger. That’s it. Those cars came out when I was teenager… When I started to focus on the contents of lifestyle magazines, hot-rod magazines were all over the newsstands. I noticed in the back of these magazines ads for car parts. You could order replacement parts. You could order a fiberglass hood for a 1970 Dodge Challenger. Bingo! Mail order. Paint the paint.”

—Richard Prince

The widespread familiarity with, symbolic power of, and mass-market nostalgia for the muscle car made it ripe for Prince’s characteristic appropriation in What I Know. “It was the perfect thing to paint. Great size. Great subtext. Great reality. Great thing that actually got painted out there, out there in real life,” Prince expressed of the hood. “I mean I didn’t have to make this shit up. It was there. Teenagers knew it. It got ‘teen-aged.’ Primed. Flaked. Stripped. Bondo-ed. Lacquered. Nine coats. Sprayed. Numbered. Advertised on. Raced. Fucking Steve McQueened.”ⁱⁱ As source material for the series, the artist acquired by mail order fiberglass reproduction parts of classic models advertised in the back pages of hot rod magazines, tapping into a nostalgia industry built around the mythos of 1960s and ’70s muscle cars. This practice extended Prince’s signature appropriation and deconstruction of mass consumerism, evolving from the photographic strategies of his Pictures Generation origins, into three dimensions. Already steeped in narrative and aesthetic affect outside of the artist’s studio, the hood offered a form ready to be reframed from functional relic into conceptual object.

“He liked the idea of taking a photograph of a photograph, just as today he likes the idea of painting over an already-painted car hood.”

—Ed Pilkington

Although Prince initially outsourced the surface work of his Hoods by hiring professional body shops, What I Know reflects a later stage in the series when he began sanding, layering Bondo automotive body filler, and painting the panels himself—bringing a distinctly personal and tactile dimension to what had once been standardized car parts. Rather than opt for the sleek commercial finish typical of motor culture, in the present work Prince manually applied coats of silvery and misty-greenish grey pigments, resulting in two softly defined color fields. This painterly handling of a mass-produced object deliberately flirts with the high seriousness of Abstract Expressionism: the subtle interplay of color evokes the powerful, meditative compositions of Mark Rothko. Prince’s wider approach had concurrently grown increasingly expressive, frequently integrating gestural mark-making and painterly effects, as seen in his later Joke paintings and Nurse series. What I Know thus straddles the space between industrial object and painterly surface, invoking Rauschenberg’s Bed or Duchamp’s assisted ready-mades as it transformed an off-the-shelf car part into a charged site of both cultural memory and aesthetic intervention.

“To de-referentialize the material is not to take it out of context. The great thing about an appropriation is that even though the transformation reads as fiction, everybody knows that the source of the appropriation was at some point non-fiction, (magazine, movie, etc.), and it's these sources, or elements of non-fiction, that gives the picture, no matter how questionable, its believable edge.”

—Richard Prince

What I Know exemplifies Prince’s ongoing exploration of how images drawn from mass media and advertising are never isolated, but part of a wider network of associations. These images shape and refract our desires, embedding themselves in the cultural, social, and political frameworks through which we understand the world. The work invites viewers to see the car hood not only as a hybrid of sculpture and painting, but as a potent item of material culture charged with decades of mythology. The title itself may allude to a pop-cultural reference, as is often the case in the Hoods, but it also suggests an autobiographical note, a gesture of personal investment from an artist long attuned to the visual language of American car culture. In this way, the work resists a purely ironic reading, instead allowing space for genuine emotional resonance. In What I Know, Prince transforms a familiar automotive form into a painterly, conceptual object, channeling cultural mythology and personal reflection to conjure the reckless allure of youth, speed, desire, and danger.

ⁱ Richard Prince, quoted in Ed Pilkington, “My way or the highway,” The Guardian, October 11, 2007, online.
ⁱⁱ Richard Prince, quoted in Nancy Spector, Richard Prince: Spiritual America, New York, 2007, p. 43.