The Plain of Smokes: Harvey Mudd and Ken Price
“The Plain of Smokes” Harvey Mudd and Ken Price. 1981 Edition number, 135/150
“The Plain of Smokes” Harvey Mudd and Ken Price. 1981 Edition number, 135/150
Twenty serigraphs with 76 pages of loose folio gatherings of text.
Peat and Repeat is excited to offer this boxed edition of The Plain of Smokes by Ken Price and Harvey Mudd.
Thanks to a generous donation all the proceeds from this sale will go to Peat and Repeat’s operating costs and building our Artist Project Fund.
Santa Barbara: Arabesque Books, 1981. Limited Edition; number 135 of 150 copies. SIGNED to colophon by both artist and author.
The Plain of Smokes is a unique collaboration between the writer Harvey Mudd and artist, Ken Price. An Ode to Los Angeles.
With 19 loose folio gatherings of text (76 pages), accompanied by 20 original serigraphs — nine in color — designed by Price and printed by Gary Lichtenstein (15.5 x 12 inch sheets); each serigraph has three respective blind-stamps of artist, publisher, and printer. Two of the prints are signed, dated and hand-numbered in pencil by Price. Publisher's pamphlet also laid-in loose. Contents laid into a clamshell case fully encased by a Los Angeles map, housed within an orange cloth slipcase with printed label to front panel.
Featuring twenty original silkscreen prints Ken Price created to illustrate a 76-page poem cycle by Harvey Mudd
Ken Price (1935-2012) emerged in the 1960s with a group of Los Angeles-based “surfer artists” that included, among others, Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin, and Larry Bell. Price is known principally as a ceramicist yet throughout his career he commanded a unique position between sculpture and painting. An artist who is celebrated for challenging conventional ideals and definitions, Price was a technical master of form, color, and surface.
Harvey Mudd (1940) is a writer, painter, and photographer. His first of four books of poetry was published in 1976, and the third, The Plain of Smokes, was short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Poetry Prize. New Mexico was Mudd’s primary home for roughly 20 years and it was there that he met Ken Price. he now lives primarily in France.
From a visual perspective The Plain of Smokes can be considered an anthropological treatise of a fleeting moment in a time when the open road, the twisted highway, represented a kind of ouroboros of sexuality, an ephemeral and wistful concept of the Utopian Dream. It’s a kind of marker, a telling tale of an America era not to be viewed sentimentally but as a passage; a Dionysian seduction between the lavish and the down and out and the lavishly down and out.
— Caterina Verde
Review of The Plain of Smokes by author, Jim Levy
Price: $ 9,800.00
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