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> The story behind Spiritual America that’s out there – Prince’s museum show catalogs; a speech he gave at the International Center for Photography in 2014, and one sketchy article by ArtForum’s David Deitcher in 2004, are not the whole picture. The gallery lasted for four shows, running from October 28th, 1983 to the end of March 1984.

> Prince had a connection, probably through

> This was a “complicated” photograph. This no longer had anything to do with money or censorship or even embarrassment. For me this photograph had to do with the medium and how the medium can get out of hand. How it can flip-out. Get strange and weird and crazy and exciting. How it can satisfy and become something desired. How an image can take on a life of its own and start to make up its own story.

> > Richard had an 8 x 10 of the Brooke image printed up and showed it to his current gallery Metro Pictures and told them this would be his next show. Just this one picture in their giant new space on Greene Street. They were not amused, telling him this would be “impossible” and mutually made the decision to end their association with him.

> Spiritual America to suit his image,” says Kimberly Fine Skeen. “I came to NYC and got a job at MoMA the second day I landed in 1979, at the time of the big blockbuster shows like the Picasso exhibit. Jeff Koons had been working there, and Diego Cortez had been there, Cortez was a guard at MoMA when Schafrazi tried to throw paint on Guernica and he stopped him. That’s where my art world connections started getting made, at MoMA’s membership desk. There were many cutting edge artists at the membership desk. I was seeing Koons for a while then.

> From there I went to Time magazine working two 12 hour shifts a week, the job was tearing the carbon between huge document pages, tearing the copy and sending them off in big tubes. Sometimes the sheet was 20 feet long, we got carbon all over our fingers and clothes. It was not glamorous and could be really tedious. That’s where I met Richard Prince, he was tearing ad sheets. We sat reading all the magazines until the copy came spitting out. I was in my early 20s, he was in his 30s. I knew he was a genius, and I was surprised he was not making a living as a photographer or artist. But his ideas were not commercial then.

> I was living at 5 Rivington Street, it was a storefront that I used as my painting studio. I could afford to live there alone and not share the space with anyone, although Michelle Zalopany stayed there a few weeks. I befriended Mary Boone and her stable of artists in 1981, they helped me put my place together. I had a stone floor Sandro Chia had given me, I was sleeping in a cube that Hanno Ahrens built, a tub that Julian Schnabel had given me, and had some art by Robin Winters and Troy Brauntuch that I had bought. Joseph Nechvetal gave me some drawings.

> Richard and I were flirting with each other, with art and ideas, then one day we had a daytime date to see a photo exhibit at the Metropolitan. We were walking arm in arm through the Met photo show when I saw a photo by Alfred Steiglitz of a horse’s ass called Spiritual America. I pointed it out to Richard and he got excited about it also, so we agreed to use it as the name of the gallery at my studio space for his first show.”

This was the first time Richard had shown a living persons photo – other than the anonymous ad pictures. Gross was exhibiting photos in a cheesy Soho gallery that sold Erte sculptures, and we chose to exhibit a photo of his at the same time. There was a lot of talk before the opening, Richard was obsessed with it, and I was getting threatening calls from Gross’s lawyer Richard Golub. It was scary, he said he would send people down to break my legs if we showed the photo. To cover the bases Richard had to credit the original photographer.”

> Richard remembers that he and Kim “cleaned up the front of the store... fresh coat of paint, a few more lights, blacked out the windows and printed up an invitation which said... By Richard Prince A Photograph of Brooke Shields by Gary Gross. (I thought about the wording a lot. I wanted to describe exactly what I was showing). We printed the description with white letters on a black background. (The card was postcard size). On the back of the card in the upper left hand corner we added the name of the gallery and its address. I decided to present the 8 x 10 of Brooke in an oversize matte with a “gold” frame and attach one of those museum lights to the top of the frame. (This light would be the only source of light when the piece went on display. The rest of the gallery would remain dark). I wanted the photograph to look normal. I wanted the presentation to be normal.”

> Everyone who should have been there was there. I remember a few - Eric Mitchell, filmmaker, writer and artist Walter Robinson. The wine was flowing, there was a sense that something was really happening, it was like a club. No one bought the print at $150, edition of 10, though I don’t think he had printed up the other nine.”

> At any rate, it was only by word of mouth, gossip, rumor, innuendo and largely unsubstantiated reports that visitors to the show even realized there was any connection between the gallery Spiritual America and Richard Prince. For the duration of the exhibition, Prince couldn’t be found in NY.

> “We were always very clear about the fact that this was a picture by Richard Prince by Gary Gross, It was important to identify the original source but even more important Richard was claiming the image as his own. On the postcard we created together it said very clearly on one side that it was Spiritual America Gallery and the other side was the name of the piece “by Richard Prince, by Gary Gross,...” It was never a secret, we mailed out hundreds of these to a select list and the media a month before the opening. But we made it difficult to come to the gallery which is why we had no exhibition dates or hours of operation dates on the card, just a phone number and address. We had a password for entry “Testimony” – it was more of the in-joke that we may have to give testimony if we got subpoenaed. The password was a result of Gross’s lawyer Richard Golub’s threats before the show opened.”

> We left the “installation” up for seven, eight weeks? And to my knowledge there’s never been a single photograph of Spiritual America, the space... the opening, the outside, the inside... nothing. I don’t think it occurred to me or Kimberly to “document” the event. I’m not sure why. We just didn’t think about adding another layer. The lack of documentation is like a joke that keeps on getting told. And in the telling, it changes. I’ve never seen any photo of anything to do with the space and that creates a kind of rarity for me. I have the memory... that’s what I have. Usually I wouldn’t ask, but you’ll just have to take my word for it. Spiritual America didn’t sell. After the show I hung the photo back at my apartment. What really happened as a result of showing the image was fallout.”

> The original picture wound its way through various friends, plumbers (?!), drummers and dealers for decades until it eventually sold for a million dollars and was confiscated as being obscene when it was shown at the Tate Modern in London. The original currently resides with collector and media empire owner Michael Ringier at his house in Zurich, according to Richard. There were editions printed up at some point, but the “gallery” association with Richard ended long before that.

> in November/December 1983, Richard curated a show by painter Peter Nadin for us. The New York Times wrote: “The still lifes morphed into a series in which Nadin began to paint giant bananas looming outside a house in a landscape, in a gauzy, impastoed style that recalled late Monet. Looked at through the lens of today’s painting revival, driven by artists romping through styles from Surrealism to neoclassicism, the paintings seem almost sophisticated in their slapstick simplicity. But what the bananas signified was, unfortunately, all too literal.”

> By late December Kim and I planned a New Years Eve party that Richard wasn’t involved in and didn’t come to. I asked Walter Robinson to do decorations thinking he would bring a few paintings to hang– he shocked us with yards and yards of black and white paintings of couples kissing and dancing on long rolls of red paper that lined both walls of the gallery.

> Who came? Filmmaker Eric Mitchell came with his starlets in tow who were very dismissive about the fact that Kim had no door on her closet. In the crowd were musician Peter Schuyff, Keith Raywood, Walter and Carlo Mc Cormick, Michelle Zalopony – Kim’s friend who had stayed at the studio and worked for Julian Schnabel, Stephen Frailey the director at Mary Boones gallery, Tina Summerlin assistant for Robert Mapplethorpe, and film director Mark Romanek. Also there was Semaphore Gallery owner Barry Blinderman, The New Show crew, Jim Downey – head writer for SNL, and Jules Baptiste. Everybody screamed and kissed at midnight. Artist Richard Hambleton came over out of his studio cave next door, he was painting his scary shadow men all over the lower east side and was already showing alarming signs of some kind of mental illness.

> It was not even on the Pop Show Inventory list I handwrote. He added it later after the show was hung, after seeing everyone else’s work. The names were misspelled on the postcard invite because we went to get it made and had no artist resumes to refer to. It shows how removed Richard was from the gallery. We were flying by the seat of our pants.”

> Kim had known Jeff since 1979, and had an affair with him, an issue that sparked jealousy on Richard’s part even though they were no longer really a couple.

> Writer David Deitcher reported in Art Forum that McCollum remembers the opening of the POP show as an "annoying event. The young women who coordinated the exhibition for Richard (who chose to remain semi- anonymous) were extremely snotty and not too bright: They decided it would be cool to paint the gallery floor with silver metallic paint, and stupidly chose to do this an hour before the reception; everyone slipped and mushed around in the wet paint and quickly left, with silver paint all over their shoes. Remember?"

> The original idea was to show our friends. We felt there was no rationale to who Richard was including other than his friends after Nadin’s very painterly show. Kim felt entitled to make some decisions since it was her space. It was important to him but it was important to her too. Maybe they betrayed each other. It turned into a big argument and there was no coming back from it. I was in the back room and could hear Kim and Richard yelling, I heard Richard turn and open the door and leave. I came out and said ‘what just happened?’ Kim said “That’s it, he’s never coming back. I think it’s over.”

> There's an article in today's Times about the Spiritual America place... Seems to be on some guide's list of places to be "pointed out". 5 Rivington... that's the place I had my gallery in back in 1983. I called it Spiritual America. It was a storefront. I guess the place that's there now is some kind of clothing store. It says in the article they're calling the place Spiritual America... The past has never been in my forehead. When I read about things that I've been inside of... it all seems like Wild History.”