Untitled (Dog in Landscape), 1988

This edition size and number for this work is unknown.

Richard Mock was first and foremost a printmaker, but was known to dabble in other media like painting, sculpture, and installation. A native of Long Beach, California, Mock went East for college, studying lithography and block printing at the University of Michigan. By 1968, he had settled in New York, where he exhibited his work at galleries including 112 Greene Street, Exit Art, and the Sideshow Gallery in Brooklyn.

112 Greene Street in SoHo opened in 1970, and was one of those time-and-place incubators where artists came together in a kismet space. The gallery played host to artists that would shape the evolution of contemporary art like Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys, Louis Bourgeois, Fran Lebowitz, Jeffrey Lew (co-founder), Gordon Matta Clarke (co-founder), Richard Serra, and William Wegman. It was here that Mock had his first New York solo exhibition in 1972. White Columns describes the exhibition as: “an environmental installation of various fabrics. Gauzy, transparent walls divided enclosed, semi-enclosed, and tent-like spaces. Plastic was arranged on the floor. Black and white vinyl curtains bordered a long corridor of white nylon. Bolts of rubberized nylon were draped from ropes and pipes. Various sections of camouflage-patterned cloth, held together with stitches, grommets, rope, and tape reinforcements covered one long wall.”

Mock remained active as an artist, supporting himself by designing linocuts for the op-ed pages of the New York Times (1980-1996), The Wall Street Journal, and many other newspapers and magazines both locally and abroad. These illustrations have been compared to work by William Hogarth or Honore Daumier, paralleling their ability to bridge the gap between editorial and fine art.

Meanwhile, Mock executed public commissions such as the "Perceiving Space" mural (1986) created for the opening of Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, or the "Take Back the Park and Don’t Get Hooked" murals (1988-1989) in Chelsea Park. The Chelsea Park murals were commissioned by the Children's Museum of Manhattan, and the artist involved local children in the project, as well as collaborator Maria Cocchiarelli-Berger. She writes about working alongside Mock on mural projects in an article published by the Museum of Friends in 2020, titled "Richard Mock : Spiritual Life." He was also featured in the 1982 P.S.1 exhibition "Beast: Animal Imagery in Recent Painting."

Mock's art frequently appeared on the covers of the magazines Fifth Estate, Alternative Press Review and Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed. His work has been cited as an influence by a number of contemporary American printmakers, among them Tom Huck and Bill Fick. Huck and Fick are both members of a group of artists known as the "Outlaw Printmakers", which as a collective unit cite Mock's work as one of its main influences.

In more recent years, Mock’s work has been the focus of the solo exhibition Spiritual Life: Richard Mock (2020) at the Museum of Friends in Southern Colorado, which presented a collection of his later works. In 2021, Brooklyn’s Kentler International Drawing Space mounted a retrospective of his prints with "Richard Mock: The Cutting Edge."