Richard Prince (born August 6, 1949) is an American conceptual artist and pop artist who rose to prominence in the 1980s in the East Village, Manhattan. He is best known for depicting models, living room furniture, watches, pens, and jewellery using rephotography and appropriation to reflect American pop culture. Prince has been the subject of major survey exhibitions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1992); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1993); Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1993); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2001, traveled to Kunsthalle Zürich and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2007, traveled to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2008); and Serpentine Gallery, London (2008). Prince has been considered by some as "one of the most revered artists of his generation", according to The New York Times.

Richard Prince was born on the 6th of August 1949, in the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone, now part of the Republic of Panama. During an interview in 2000 with Julie L. Belcove, he responded to the question of why his parents were in the Zone, by saying "they worked for the government." Prince was first interested in the art of the American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. "I was very attracted to the idea of someone who was by themselves, fairly antisocial, kind of a loner, someone who was noncollaborative." Prince grew up during the height of Pollock's career, making his work accessible. The 1956 Time magazine article dubbing Pollock "Jack the Dripper" made the thought of pursuing art as career possible. After finishing high school in 1967, Prince set off for Europe at age 18. Prince has said that his attraction to New York was instigated by the famous photograph of Franz Kline gazing out the window of his 14th Street studio. Prince described the picture as "a man content to be alone, pursuing the outside world from the sanctum of his studio."

In 1973, Prince moved to New York and joined publishing company Time Inc. His job at the Time Inc. library involved providing the company's various magazines with tear sheets of articles.

Prince's first solo exhibition took place in June 1980 during a residency at the CEPA gallery in Buffalo, New York. His short book Menthol Wars was published as part of the residency. In 1981 Prince had his first West Coast solo exhibition at Jancar Kuhlenschmidt Gallery in Los Angeles. In 1985, he spent four months making art in a rented house in Venice, Los Angeles. Prince had very little experience with photography, but he has said in interviews that all he needed was a subject, the medium would follow, whether it be paint and brush or camera and film. He compared his new method of searching out interesting advertisements to "beachcombing." His first series during this time focused on models, living room furniture, watches, pens, and jewellery. Pop culture became the focus of his work. Prince described his experience of appropriation thus:

"At first it was pretty reckless. Plagiarizing someone else’s photograph, making a new picture effortlessly. Making the exposure, looking through the lens and clicking, felt like an unwelling . . . a whole new history without the old one. It absolutely destroyed any associations I had experienced with putting things together. And of course the whole thing about the naturalness of the film’s ability to appropriate. I always thought it had a lot to do with having a chip on your shoulder."

In the late 1980s, Prince, like his contemporaries Lorna Simpson and Barbara Kruger, as well as many of his Conceptual Art precursors, played with image and text in a strategy that was becoming increasingly popular. Prince put jokes among cartoons, often from The New Yorker. On the topic of found photographs, Prince said, "Oceans without surfers, cowboys without Marlboros…Even though I’m aware of the classicism of the images. I seem to go after images that I don’t quite believe. And, I try to re-present them even more unbelievably."

In November 1983, Prince along with then girlfriend Kimberley Fine opened a short-lived art gallery named Spiritual America in New York's Lower East Side. The only initial exhibit was a photograph of the same name, which was a photograph of one of Garry Gross' photos of 10-year-old Brooke Shields standing naked in a bathtub, displayed in a "cheap gold frame". Prince himself referred to the image as an "extremely complicated photo of a naked girl who looks like a boy made up to look like a woman". The gallery had another show entitled "POP", though the contents of both this exhibition and the closing of the gallery some time later remain uncertain.

Despite initially only attracting a singular brief press mention, the namesake photo however has had a longer legacy. When a Prince print of Shields was included in his 2009 Spiritual America exhibit at the Tate Modern, it created a stir. It was removed from an exhibition after a warning from the police. Prince created a numbered series of 10 prints (and two artists proofs) measuring 20 inches by 24 inches (50.8 cm x 60.9 cm) of his reproduction of the Gross/Shields photo. In May 2014, copy #10 of Prince's reproduction of the Gross photo was auctioned off by Christie's, fetching a price of $3.97 million. This surpassed his previous high for a photo of $3.4 million, set at Sotheby’s New York in 2007.