First exhibition focused on Basquiat's notebooks opens in Miami.
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988), a cultural icon, is one of the most original, influential and prolific artists of his generation. Born in Brooklyn to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat was raised in a cross-cultural and multilingual family becoming fluent in Haitian Creole, Spanish and English—languages that resonate within Miami’s cultural landscape. In the early 1980s, he rose quickly from teenage street artist to a celebrity in both the art scene and popular culture. He was a self-taught artist with encyclopedic and multicultural interests, influenced by comics, advertising, children's sketches, Pop art, hip-hop, politics and everyday life. He is best known for combining vibrant colors, abstract gestures and figuration with language, which often appears in his paintings and drawings in at least one of his three spoken languages. Basquiat’s handwritten texts are an integral part of his work, as these push the between language and drawing, as well as reveal the artist’s provocative cultural imaginary.
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988), a cultural icon, is one of the most original, influential and prolific artists of his generation. Born in Brooklyn to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat was raised in a cross-cultural and multilingual family becoming fluent in Haitian Creole, Spanish and English—languages that resonate within Miami’s cultural landscape. In the early 1980s, he rose quickly from teenage street artist to a celebrity in both the art scene and popular culture. He was a self-taught artist with encyclopedic and multicultural interests, influenced by comics, advertising, children's sketches, Pop art, hip-hop, politics and everyday life. He is best known for combining vibrant colors, abstract gestures and figuration with language, which often appears in his paintings and drawings in at least one of his three spoken languages. Basquiat’s handwritten texts are an integral part of his work, as these push the between language and drawing, as well as reveal the artist’s provocative cultural imaginary.
Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks provides a significant opportunity to view these remarkable notebooks up close, inviting new insights and perspectives on Basquiat’s art and his extraordinary talent of using “words like brushstrokes,” as he once famously said. In Miami, this is also an opportunity to reconsider Basquiat’s rich cultural background, familiar to our local context and expressed in his exceptional legacy.
Beginning August 12 through October 16, 2016, Pérez Art Museum Miami.
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