The good die young, but the great are celebrated long after they are gone from this world. In that vein, the Puerto Rico Art Museum and ArtPremium Magazine recently launched Basquiat: An Anthology for Puerto Rico, a retrospective on the life of Jean-Michel Basquiat. This exhibition, the first of his work in Puerto Rico, is a homecoming of sorts. Born of Puerto Rican and Haitian heritage, this cultural mélange helped catalyze, embolden, and infuse Jean-Michel's work with a duality and schizophrenia that could best be described as Americanism.
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) was the embodiment of what some would call the hip-hop culture ethos. He went from "ashy to classy"; from aerosol painting on walls to having his painting Charles the First prominently displayed in the collection of one Shawn "Jay Z" Carter. Basquiat, the sometime musician, brought the streets into the fine arts arena via his cut-and-paste aesthetic and exaltation of graffiti. Wood, paper, canvas, paint, marker, and oil stick fluidly facilitated the madness that Basquiat poured into his art. His brain was a visual sampler, and his work a cultural, anthropological mixtape. Both he and his work are representations of the dynamic, genre-defying, youth culture that we now live with.
As the child of the creative freedom forged by the Afri-COBRA and Black Abstraction movements, Basquiat delivered a body of work that was refreshing, intelligent, and challenging--both stylistically, and thematically. He changed the game, and some of us are surely playing because of him.
Although he departed too soon, he left behind an artistic legacy that is represented, in part, by the 150 plus works on display at the Puerto Rico Art Museum.
Basquiat: An Anthology for Puerto Rico will be on display at the Puerto Rico Art Museum through January 1, 2007.
Comments
I love the way you wrote this article. I'm just imagining how nice it would be to be in PR right now just to see this! I wonder if they will do this in Haiti as well.