Born in Brooklyn on December 22, 1960, to a Haitian father, and a Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat grew up in a household where French, Spanish, and English overlapped easily. His mother, a massive fan of art, took him to the great museums of New York and signed him up as a junior member of the Brooklyn Museum.
After getting severely injured at seven years old—he was hit by a car while playing stickball in the streets of Brooklyn and lost his spleen as a result—his mother placed a copy of Gray’s Anatomy in his hands during his long recovery. The anatomical drawings in the book stayed with him for the rest of his life. They would later surface as skeletons, internal organs, and fragmented bodies, among other images that populated almost all of his major later paintings.
Basquiat’s family did not hold together. His parents separated when he was around eight years old. His mother was institutionalized in a psychiatric facility due to severe mental illness and clinical depression. Between 1974 and 1976 he lived with his father and younger sisters in Puerto Rico. When they eventually moved back to Brooklyn, Basquiat’s relationship with his father grew more strained. All of this led to Basquiat leaving home for good and dropping out of school at age 17. He started sleeping on friends’ floors, in abandoned buildings, or on park benches. He began selling hand-drawn postcards and painting T-shirts on the street to make some money to eat, and he started writing on the walls of the city.
While at a mutual friend’s house, Basquiat met Al Diaz. Initially as an inside joke, together they invented the persona SAMO©, short for “Same Old Shit.” The phrases they sprayed across SoHo, the East Village, and the D train were not just ordinary graffiti. They were short, cryptic, and almost philosophical statements that people stopped to read:
“SAMO© A PIN DROPS LIKE A PUNGENT ODOR…”
“SAMO© JUST IN CASE…”
Anonymous at first, then increasingly noticed. By the late 1970s the art world started to pay attention.
In 1980 Basquiat’s work appeared in The Times Square Show, a legendary group exhibition that also featured artists like Jenny Holzer and Keith Haring. The following year, René Ricard—a famous poet, actor, painter, and, most importantly, art critic—published “The Radiant Child.” The critic’s essay mentioned Keith Haring’s “crawling baby” character and highlighted works by Judy Rifka, John Ahearn, and Joe Zucker, among others. This essay is now mainly famous and credited with launching the public career of Basquiat. The article turned Basquiat into a name. At twenty years old, he was suddenly one of the most talked-about young painters in New York—if not the most.
His canvases arrived fully formed: crowns, skulls, stick figures, crossed-out words, references to jazz musicians, boxers, Haitian history, colonial violence, and the street. Working with acrylic, oil stick, crayon, and collage, often on whatever surface was available to him, the paintings felt urgent, unfinished in the best sense, and impossible to look past or ignore.
1982 is the year when everything started accelerating. Solo exhibitions in New York, LA, and even internationally in Zurich and Rome. At 21 years of age, Basquiat became the youngest artist ever included in Documenta in Kassel, the most important exhibition of contemporary art, which takes place once every five years. The following year he entered the Whitney Biennial, the longest-running survey of contemporary American art, held every two years. That same year Andy Warhol befriended Basquiat, and the two began a series of collaborations that mixed Warhol’s cool silkscreens with raw Basquiat energy. Collectors, art dealers, and celebrities started filling his studio. In 1985 The New York Times Magazine put Basquiat on the cover as a symbol of the contemporary art boom. At 24 years old, Basquiat was on top of the world.
Being on top of the world took a toll, though. Moving up so far so quickly carried its damage. The constant New York demand, the parties, the money, and also the heroin all arrived together. Friends watched as Basquiat grew thinner and more isolated. In a desperate attempt to escape the addiction and the fast-moving world around him, Basquiat spent some time in Hawaii. After detoxing for a couple of months he returned to New York claiming sobriety. Sadly, the self-claimed sobriety did not hold. On August 12, 1988, Jean-Michel Basquiat was found dead of a heroin overdose in the loft he rented from the Warhol estate. He was 27—way too young—and joined the likes of Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison in the infamous 27 Club.
In less than a decade Basquiat moved from writing cryptic sentences on subway trains to standing at the absolute height and in the center of the international art world. He brought Black and Latino experience into spaces that rarely made room for it, and he did so without censorship or softening the edges.
The energy that once covered the walls of downtown New York still moves worldwide through the paintings. The walls were only the beginning for Jean-Michel Basquiat.
To this day, for me, Basquiat’s art calls upon strong feelings and sends striking messages and questions. To this day his art generates a ton of criticism and hate for being primitive and easy to make. To me it’s not that simple, though. Yes, a lot of people could do something like Basquiat, but can you be Basquiat? Can you put your heart, your past experiences with a father, a mother, depression, and homelessness—or your soul—into your art in a way comparable to Basquiat? You can’t.
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