Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist whose brief, blazing career made him a legend of the 1980s art world. Born in Brooklyn in 1960 to Haitian and Puerto Rican parents, he first gained notice spray-painting cryptic poetic phrases around downtown Manhattan under the tag SAMO. He quickly moved from the street into galleries, where his raw, urgent paintings caused a sensation.

His canvases mix scrawled words, crowns, skeletons, and figures drawn from Black history, jazz, sports, and his own life, layered like a visual stream of consciousness. He became close with Andy Warhol and rose to fame with startling speed. Basquiat died of a drug overdose in 1988 at just twenty seven, and his powerful, energetic work now ranks among the most sought-after art of its era.