If you are a fan of the works of legendary Haitian-Puerto Rican artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat and you are in New York City, chances are you may have probably heard about his solo exhibition at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in East Village from March 6 to May 15.
However, if you have not been quick enough to book a free ticket out of the 50,000 reservations that were made available, your chances of experiencing this rare, once-in-a-lifetime solo exhibition may be slim as you’ll have to join a waitlist.
The exhibition, which is taking place to celebrate the opening of the new Brant Foundation Art Study Center at the aforementioned address is being held in conjunction with the
“Basquiat has been a cornerstone of the East Village art scene for decades, and to bring his work back to the
The ongoing exhibition,
“The retrospective will show Basquiat as a resolutely contemporary artist who created a foretaste of our Internet society by using cut-and-paste sampling from his surroundings. With the astonishing radicalness of his artistic practice, Basquiat renewed the concept of art with enduring impact,”
If you are one of the fortunate ones to be attending the exhibition, be on the lookout for the Untitled (1981) painting that sold for a record $110.5 million in 2017 making Basquiat’s art the most expensive American painting of all time.
Who is Jean-Michel Basquiat?
Basquiat is an important and rising fixture in popular American culture, albeit posthumously, and as such, a notable figure in the Pan-African dialogue.
He was born on December 22nd, 1960, to a Haitian father and a mother of Puerto-Rican descent in Brooklyn. He experienced a great deal at a young age; he was in car accident that resulted in a splenectomy at age 7, his parents divorced at the same age; his mother, who first introduced him to art, was committed into a mental institution, and he dropped out of school by the age of 15. But within a few years, he went from being homeless and unemployed to selling his paintings for $25,000.
Although many people know him for his celebrity, as he was friends with the pop artist, Andy Warhol, wore Armani suits splattered with paint from his work, and dated Madonna, the painter’s work was politic and deserves its own fanfare.
Basquiat was intentional and well versed in the social issues of his time. He once said, “the black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings. I realized that I didn’t see many paintings with black people in them.”
Basquiat died at the age of 27 from a heroin overdose but he lives forever through his art and the impact of his work and influence on American movements and pop culture.
