Richard Prince arrived in NYC in August 1974. He stayed in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn with a friend of a friend for two weeks and then rented a small one bedroom sublet on Prince and West Broadway. He had saved 1,500 dollars from teaching pottery to high school students working at a private country day school south of Boston. He had read an article in the New York Times Magazine about Soho. He wanted to check it out and thought he'd come down and stay for three months. He had spent most of the summer of '74 in southern Maine house sitting for a family, and when they returned he thought it might be a good time to go the place he always wanted to go to.
One of the first things he did after he arrived in New York was look for a drawing class. Figure drawing. He'd been going to one up in Maine for three years. He found a class on Greene St that met twice a week... maybe twenty people went... chipped in ten dollars to pay for a model, sometimes two models at the same time. The figuredrawing sessions back in Maine were organized by friends. After three hours of drawing, they would open up beer and pass around their drawings and talk to each other about what they had just drawn. This didn't happen on Greene St. No beer. No talking about what they drew. It wasn't AA. They didn't share. What they did was private. Everybody was in their own worlds."I didn't know anybody when I came to New York City. I was on my own and spent days where the only conversation I would have was with a bartender."
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