A ground-breaking figure in the downtown New York art scene of the 1980s, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) developed a singular neo-expressionism marked by the intersection of modernist and vernacular visual languages. Characterized by an urgency of feeling, his work explores the Black experience, celebrating histories and heroes of Black art, music, sport, poetry, and religion while reflecting the contexts of racism, colonialism, poverty, police brutality, and consumerism. His improvisational style has often been likened to jazz, balancing seemingly contradictory qualities: spontaneity and control, anger and beauty. During his explosive and brief career, from 1980 through his untimely death in 1988, Basquiat created approximately one thousand paintings and twice as many drawings. Therein, recurring motifs emerge from gestural marks, alongside lists, diagrams, pictograms, and anatomical sketches.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1960 to a Haitian-American father and a Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat began drawing at a young age. He suffered internal injuries after being hit by a car at age seven, and as he healed his mother gave him a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, which heavily influenced his later work. From 1977 through ’79, with his friend Al Diaz, he spray-painted aphorisms on the subway and around lower Manhattan as the fictional character SAMO. Basquiat befriended uptown graffitists such as Fred Braithwaite and Lee Quinones and was a regular at the Mudd Club, Club 57, and CBGB’s; he also played in a noise music band. He painted indiscriminately on surfaces in the urban environment—apartment walls and doors, refrigerators, cardboard boxes—and soon fell in with Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Glenn O’Brien, and Diego Cortez, who began selling Basquiat’s drawings and collages. In 1980, Basquiat’s work was exhibited for the first time in the landmark exhibition Times Square Show, and the following year he participated in New York/New Wave at P.S.1 in Long Island City. In 1981, he was the subject of Rene Ricard’s iconic article “The Radiant Child” in Artforum, and his first solo exhibition was mounted at Galleria d’Arte Emilio Mazzoli in Modena, Italy. That year, he starred in Downtown 81, a verité film written by Glenn O’Brien and produced by Maripol that wasn’t released until 2000. In 1982, he had his first solo exhibition in the US at the Annina Nosei Gallery in New York, as well as a solo at Larry Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles and one in Zurich, with Galerie Bruno Bischofberger. He was the youngest artist, at twenty-one, to participate in Documenta, Kassel (1982), and he was included in the 1983 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 1983, he began a friendship and collaboration with Andy Warhol that garnered significant publicity, and in 1984 he joined the Mary Boone Gallery. The first museum exhibition dedicated to his work was organized by the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, in 1984 (traveled to Institute for Contemporary Arts, London, and Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam). In the final years of his life, Basquiat struggled with heroin abuse, leading to his death from an accidental overdose at the age of twenty-seven. Basquiat’s life and work are the subject of the film Basquiat (1996), directed by Julian Schnabel.