Richard Prince’s secretive Upper East Side bookstore Fulton Ryder will close on December 25, the store wrote in an email to its mailing list today.
Fulton Ryder, a pseudonym of Prince’s, was run by Fabiola Alondra and staged gallery-like shows—even participating (in its own way) in art fairs—so its quite possible that the closing of the physical space won’t hinder future projects. Then again, Prince soon plans to open the 300-acre Ryder Road Foundation near his house in Rensselaerville, New York, so perhaps that’s where his attention is at the moment.
The full email from the gallery is available below:
Fulton Ryder was always meant to be an ephemeral space, an experimental venue for spontaneous creativity where things constantly changed and shifted. Enigmatic and a hard to define space, Fulton Ryder didn’t follow the rules or fit a traditional definition. Focused on art, books and publishing, it remained an outsider presence with invitation only appointments held in a mysterious location and run by Fabiola Alondra. We displayed the work of emerging artists such as Genieve Figgis and BP Laval, two artists discovered via Twitter, who we showed for the first time here. We published provocative books by John Dogg and Howard Johnson as well as Dan Colen’s off the beaten track joke and whoopee cushion book. We printed Marilyn Minter’s first artist book Plush and completed our publication series with a limited edition book Soft & Loose of never before seen works by Justin Adian. Our goal was to promote, show and publish the work of these artists without making profit off of them. We pushed the boundaries and focused on the inseparable connection between books and art, artists and books and the book as art object. Inspired by the late John McWhinnie, Fulton Ryder was both sacred and profane. And our books will now become rare collectibles. Read more books. The end is only the beginning of something else…