Artists

Jean-Michel Basquiat was the embodiment of the raw, urban, Punk-art revolution that began to spread through New York City in the 1970s and reached full force in the 1980s. Basquiat was poor, a high-school drop out, and homeless, but always making art. Basquiat's presence on the streets and in the clubs of New York City allowed him to meet many of the young, rebellious artists that were beginning to turn the art world on its head. He and Keith Haring dominated the Graffiti art movement as the artists who best leaped from the street scene into the most prestigious galleries, where their work garnered considerable attention and high price tags. Basquiat blended instinctive, expressive lines, scribbled text and fields of bold color with mixed media, forming representations of the issues that were important to him. Basquiat informed much of his work with ideas about his African heritage, institutionalized racism, as well as the New York City counterculture. Jean-Michel Basquiat was only twenty seven years old when he died of a drug overdose in 1988.