Spotlight: Jean-Michel BasquiatWe start off our Black History Month Spotlight Series with a lo
Spotlight: Jean-Michel BasquiatWe start off our Black History Month Spotlight Series with a look at the life of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.Jean Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was born and raised in Brooklyn, the son of a Haitian-American father and a Puerto Rican mother. His career as a graffiti artist and musician was fostered in the 1980’s New York Art Scene. Under the pseudonym SAMO he’d leave poetical messages impregnated on city walls… “Plush safe he think’… ‘SAMO as an alternative to the bourgeois”. With his crowning of trademark dreadlocks, Basquiat was a regular downtown fixture – he’d go on to become one of the most important artists of the 20th century.Jean-Michel is credited with introducing graffiti into the realm of fine art. His paintings are often described as childlike; dealing with human anatomy, dense imagery, and his African-American heritage. The mixture of Afrocentric themes with graffiti, anchored on canvas with his esoteric texts and symbols was unconventional and hard to ignore.His genius trapped in a burgeoning art movement set on ‘crazed’ did nothing to help slow down the excesses he became a victim of. At the age of twenty-seven he was found dead of a drug overdose in his Great Jones loft…the Radiant Child had left his canvassed works behind screaming at the world, their many faces torturing and riveting, like his legacy. The Whitney Museum of American Art held the first retrospective of his work from October 1992 to February 1993, and in 2016 his large canvas Untitled (1982) broke auction records with a final price of $57.3 million.“He disrupted the politics of the art world and insisted that if he had to play their games, he would make the rules. His images entered the dreams and museums of the exploiters, and the world would never be the same.” – Keith HaringBasquiat is sometimes more commonly talked of in the context of celebrity than artistically; his friendships/collaborations with Pop Art icon Andy Warhol are still critiqued in the vortex of pop culture phenomena. But there’s so much more…–> Head over to HAHAMAG.COM to enjoy our supplemental links to more information on the life of Basquiat.*image Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1985 Photo: AP -- source link
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