Political Voice and Social Commentary - Year 11 Visual Arts: Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat was a Neo-Expressionist painter in the 1980s. He is best known for his primitive style and his collaboration with pop artist Andy Warhol.

A poet, musician, and graffiti prodigy in late-1970s New York, Jean-Michel Basquiat had honed his signature painting style of obsessive scribbling, elusive symbols and diagrams, and mask-and-skull imagery by the time he was 20. “I don’t think about art while I work,” he once said. “I think about life.” Basquiat drew his subjects from his own Caribbean heritage—his father was Haitian and his mother of Puerto Rican descent—and a convergence of African-American, African, and Aztec cultural histories with Classical themes and contemporary heroes like athletes and musicians.

"If you had only twenty-four hours left to live, what would you do?" "I don't know. I'd go hang out with my mother and my girlfriend, I guess."
--video interview, Tamra Davis and Becky Johnston, 1986