Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) was an American artist whose rapid rise from New York’s downtown graffiti and music culture into the international art world made him one of the defining painters of the 1980s. Emerging first through the cryptic SAMO texts placed around lower Manhattan, Basquiat developed paintings and drawings in which crowns, anatomical fragments, repeated words, lists, diagrams and references to Black history collided across heavily worked surfaces.

His images draw energy from street culture, jazz, hip-hop, art history and commercial signs while repeatedly returning to questions of race, power, fame, heroism and exploitation. Basquiat achieved major gallery and museum attention while still in his early twenties, and his death at twenty-seven fixed an already accelerated career into a powerful cultural mythology.