Jean-Michel Basquiat

(USA, 1960 – 1988) was an American artist who first achieved fame as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, alongside Al Diaz, writing enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of Manhattan’s Lower East Side during the late 1970s, where rap, punk, and street art coalesced into early hip-hop music culture. 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. He used social commentary in his paintings as a tool for introspection and for identifying with his experiences in the Black community of his time, as well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism. His visual poetics were acutely political and direct in their criticism of colonialism and support for class struggle. Basquiat’s
died at the age of 27 from a heroin overdose, in 1988.