On August 12, 1988, Jean-Michel Basquiat died in New York City at just 27 years old. His life was brief, but the mark he left on American art was enormous. Born in Brooklyn in 1960 to a Haitian American father and a Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat grew up surrounded by different languages, cultures, music and the energy of New York City. In the late 1970s, he began gaining attention through the graffiti and street-art scene under the name SAMO, a project he created with Al Diaz. What started on city walls eventually moved into galleries, where Basquiat developed a distinctive visual language filled with words, symbols, anatomical drawings, historical references, crowns, fragmented figures and repeated ideas about race, wealth, power and identity.
Basquiat became one of the most recognized artists of the 1980s, working alongside and eventually exhibiting with some of the most influential figures in the New York art world. His paintings confronted the absence and misrepresentation of Black people in mainstream art while also drawing attention to Black musicians, athletes, historical figures and cultural heroes. His success came incredibly quickly, and his work became highly sought after while he was still in his twenties. Yet the circumstances surrounding his rise also reflected the complicated relationship between Black artists, the art market and institutions that had historically excluded them. Basquiat died from a heroin overdose at his Manhattan studio on August 12, 1988. He was only 27. More than three decades later, his paintings continue to be exhibited, studied and debated, and his influence reaches far beyond galleries into fashion, music and contemporary visual culture. His story is a reminder that Basquiat was not simply a young artist who became famous. He was an important cultural figure who used art to question who gets represented, who gets remembered and who gets to define history. #BlackHistory #JeanMichelBasquiat #BlackArt
@n3wthangs He tried talking to her several times in the villa. She kept running away. This came out on a live he was on while Nic was djing in the background. Caleb was tipsy 🥴