Ken Price first became interested in Mexican folk pottery during his surfing trips to Tijuana. Following his move to Taos, New Mexico, in 1971, Price embarked on a large-scale project informed by Southwestern vernacular art and his visits to curio stores across the border . This ambitious project envisioned creating a full curio store environment with a storefront, where the artist would sell his functional and serialized yet one-of-a-kind wares—plates, bowls, ewers, and cups—to visitors, but it was never realized due to financial constraints. Price subsequently grouped related vessels together and displayed them as independent cabinet “units” for his 1978 LACMA exhibition “Happy’s Curios.”
Town Unit One, like several other “units” from the series “Happy’s Curios,” is unique within Price’s oeuvre for its painted, figurative decoration: against the backdrop of a lake or a clear blue sky, a figure with a sombrero appears standing, sitting, sleeping amongst colorful cacti or steering his canoe towards the sunset. Price’s color palette, his adoption of angular silhouettes for some of the vessels, and the depiction of human figures engaged in everyday activities pays homage to various craft traditions in Mexico, especially Tonalá and Tlaquepaque wares from the state of Jalisco. Moreover, the artist’s conception of the display unit—the white-painted wood cabinet—as an intrinsic part of the work follows in the footsteps of such artists as Joseph Cornell and Claes Oldenburg and playfully acknowledges the conditions of display as an essential factor in determining the work’s reception. As such, Town Unit One also embodies the artist’s life-long pursuit of challenging established categories (such as “fine art” vs. craft) and redefining contemporary sculpture.