Jean-Michel Basquiat - Celebrating Black History Month

Now that black history month is amongst us, I will be featuring a favorite legend of mine each week of this month. Starting with one of my favorite artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Basquait was an artist, musician, and producer based in New York. Most of his art pieces was created in the late 70's and most of the 80's.

He created street art, graffiti, and abstract pieces that focused on poverty, hip hop, and poetry within society and black communities. I really love how he grasped the realities with racism and classism within America.

He was also sexy as hell...

In the 70's he started creating graffiti art on buildings in New York, for a project called SAMO. SAMO stood for "Same old shit", that reflected on issues that society wasn't normally concerned with. The project landed him a job and ended up making regular TV appearances that helped him form a band called Gray. 

The legendary crown! If you aren't familiar with Basquiat, you may have ran across his crown drawings. Basquiat drew the crown over all of his heroes. Figurines, jazz musicians, and other artist. It became a known symbol to his work.

He created childlike art pieces, some were drawn with just colored pencils.

He created pieces that suggested that Egypt was the start of western civilization. He painted words like "Nile" then scribbled it out, suggesting that historians forgot that Egyptians were black and blacks were enslaved.

He painted Nubian mask dark, which was considered to be the slaves by the Egyptian people. Putting words likes "salt" to represent the slave trade throughout the Atlantic ocean.

He also illustrated how African-Americans have been controlled by a predominantly Caucasian society. This is another reason I love his work. He used art to speak and bring up issues in the African American communities that many weren't talking about. 

It is the same way how rappers in hip hop use their music to bring up issues. I personally love any ones work that makes us think and makes us look deeper than beyond the surface.

You can feel his pain and frustrations just by looking at his work. His childhood, happiness, anger, depression, issues he dealt with, all in his work. I love how he also makes us open a book. The word choices and hidden messages won me over.

Abstract art is one of my favorite types of art. So it is clear why I chose to focus on Basquiat.

As I get older and become wiser, my taste for art gets deeper. My thoughts gets deep and my heart gets stronger. A lot of artist create to express themselves and you either get it or you don't. 

His work for me and his message behind it was far more than just paint on canvas. If you allow your mind to go where he is taking you, you will truly understand and allow it to take you to another place. It will also help your creative mind wonder.

Basquait collaborated with another one of my favorite artist, Andy Warhol. Warhol was famous for his pop art modern creations, which made his work amazing with Basquiat.

One of my favorite pieces...

The famous picture of the two.

Unfortunately with depression comes other things. After Andy Warhol lost his life, Baquait lost his soon after.

I will not focus on the death, but the life of his work. To learn more about Basquiat and his work go here.

12/22/1960 -8/12/1988

Were you already familiar with Basquiat? Do you have a favorite piece?

To purchase the Basquiat shirt I wore earlier in the week, click here.

Images: Google