American artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent. Basquiat first achieved fame as part of SAMO, an informal graffiti duo who wrote enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the late 1970s, where rap, punk, and street art coalesced into early hip-hop music culture. By the 1980s, his neo-expressionist paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his art in 1992.
Basquiat’s art focused on dichotomies such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. He appropriated poetry, drawing, and painting, and married text and image, abstraction, figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique.
Born: December 22, 1960, Brooklyn, New York, NY
Died: August 12, 1988, Great Jones Street, New York, NY
On view: UCCA Center for Contemporary Art
Periods: Neo-expressionism, Contemporary art, Primitivism
Movies: Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat
Education: Saint John’s School, Saint Ann’s School, City-As-School, Edward R. Murrow High School
Quotes
I don’t think about art when I’m working. I try to think about life.
I don’t listen to what art critics say. I don’t know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.
I had some money, I made the best paintings ever. I was completely reclusive, worked a lot, took a lot of drugs. I was awful to people.