Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! The energy always builds on the streets of NYC as Halloween approaches. The night feels inky and dense, the air cold and damp, with dried leaves and bits of garbage lightly clattering across the sidewalk in sudden whirlwinds. The city’s nerves tightened this week as masked ICE agents descended on Canal Street, pursuing the sidewalk sellers of faux Chanel and Versace shades. And in a curious coincidence, the East Wing of the White House was reduced to rubble — surely a metaphor waiting to be explained.
A piece inThe Art Newspapertracks how the mayoral candidates view the arts: funding, creative-sector jobs, and affordability for artists.
In street art news, we were lucky to catch the naming of a NYC street after Jean-Michel Basquiat this week with his two sisters, step-mom, and the extended family – and an enthusiastic crowd. The City of New York dedicated the Jean-Michel Basquiat Way at The Bowery and Great Jones Street a few feet from JMB’s old studio. Some might consider it an irony that a former vandal gets his way, all these years later. Other’s recognize that these issues are not black and white, but are often GRAY.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this time featuring Chusma, Dirt Cobain, JG Toonation, Mack & Frodrik, Merck, Modomatic, Outer Source, SAMO, Uncut Art, and Unfollow.
Liz Munsell, Greg Tate (ed.): Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation
Reprinted from the original review.
The catalogue Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation, accompanying the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston exhibition, is as multifaceted and dynamic as its subject. Edited by Liz Munsell and Greg Tate, this robust volume unravels the layers of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s artistic world and his role within a transformative cultural era. It positions Basquiat not just as an individual artist but as a pivotal figure in a constellation of intersecting movements reshaping art, music, and performance in 1970s and 1980s New York City.
The book is as much a cultural chronicle as it is an artistic study. It captures the chaotic, electrifying energy of a New York where the boundaries between “high” and “low” art dissolved, and the street became an unregulated gallery. The text delves into the social and cultural exchanges between the Uptown and Downtown scenes—worlds simultaneously divided and united by race, class, and artistic vision. These layers are vividly brought to life through essays that explore the societal forces shaping Basquiat’s era: the collapse of urban economies, the rise of hip-hop, and the cultural syncretism that defined the city’s creative spaces.
MARTHA COOPER LIBRARY: BOOK RECOMMENDATION
? | Title: Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation ? | Publisher: MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (May 5, 2020) ? | Authors: Liz Munsell, Greg Tate (ed.) With contributions by J. Faith Almiron, Dakota DeVos, Hua Hsu, and Carlo McCormick ? | Language: English
Spring is astoundingly colorful on the street in New York this year, with many new graffiti writers and street artists joining the existing throng and bringing their skills to a wall near you. At times, it appears now that we have as many artists as tourists in New York, but if they roll a suitcase, it is probably full of cans.
Here is our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Ron English, Homesick, Basquiat, Huetek, Biggie Smalls, Hops Art, Akira Toriyama, Blanca Romero, 2DX, Nike Kasio, Gouch NKC, Theme KED, Maximilian Romero, EA EO, Browine, Sintez One, FSG Park, and Jaek El Diablo.
Sometimes, this frog feels like the water seems to be getting a little warm if you know what I mean. Our minds are being strained daily by a laundry list of stressors, not the least of which is neverending war. It is almost like it is profitable for industry. Also, it is surprising how many initiatives have been approved and passed during new periods of crisis ever since 9/11. Why does it seem like a new normal is introduced every two years? Meanwhile, the House is not in order, doesn’t even have a leader, 2 of the Orange man’s lawyers plead guilty this week, Biden’s giving 100 billion to Ukraine and Israel,
Meanwhile, people are still buying pumpkins this year for Halloween, the leaves are starting to turn yellow and orange, it is raining for the 7th weekend straight, and street artists and graffiti writers are keeping the streets alive from Grand Army Plaza to LES to Bushwick to Midwood to da Bronx. We have noticed several portraits and figurative works that ring true – and photographer Jaime Rojo shares some of them below.
So here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring Calicho Art, David Puck, Mort Art, Le Crue, Andaluz the Artist, Humble, Miki Mu, Blanco, SEF, J. Novik, Hu, Carnivorous Flora, Mue Bon, Girlty, Manuel Alejandro, and Al Ruiz.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! And how beautiful this city is, even when the heat is on. The amount of talent on our streets is so overwhelming, thank you New York.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Homesick, Mort Art, Optimo NYC, Savior El Mundo, Neckface, Lungebox, DEK2DX, Hektad, Paolo Tolentino, Jappy Agoncillo, SMURFO, Mike King, Mat Lakas, Lasak Art, Snith Node, Big808, Talia Lempert, Individual Activist.
Ah, summer in the city! New York offers a myriad of choices for your entertainment and to perhaps enhance your appreciation of art and its crucial role in society. Aside from simply cruising the streets to see new works directly on city walls, one exhibition firmly rooted in the New York street art story that we highly recommend this summer is entitled “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure” currently on view in Chelsea. The exhibition is organized by his family with his sisters Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux directing a narrative that is personal and revelatory. The exhibition opened in the Spring and we wrote about it HERE
Christopher Makos. Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure”
Click HERE for more details, tickets and schedules.
Scholarship about the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat since his death in 1988 has been extensive. With dozens of books written, world-class museums have organized exhibitions about his work, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Barbican in London, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, the MFA in Boston, and the MCA in Denver. Substantial catalogs were also offered with most of the shows, analyzing his work from different curatorial viewpoints. At least a couple of documentaries from 2010 and 2017 have presented audiences with stories of his meteoric career from his early days to superstardom, fame, and record-breaking prices for his work.
Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure offers a new perspective on the artist, his life, and his work...This New York City exhibition endeavors to complete the story in a decidedly familial way. Curated by his two sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, with help from his stepmother, Nora Fitzpatrick, the artist is repositioned as a son, brother, uncle, and friend. An emotional exhibition that feels intimate even though more than 200 artworks are on display, King Pleasure posits that there may be more to Jean-Michel than you previously knew.
A shining jewel unveiled at the apex of the New York spring art season, the new show reaffirms the strength of the artists’ personal syntax and his distinctive ability to encode and innovate on streets and canvasses the DNA of American culture and history for his time and ours. The sisters and stepmother firmly assert Jean-Michel’s legacy, and simultaneously they gift fans and admirers one more musical, visual, poetic composition from a departed friend.
Because of the nature of late 20th-century art-collecting, so many of Basquiat’s works are now only in private hands, unavailable to see. Here is an eclectic collection of fully realized works and sketches in his trademark style. The show feels well-rounded and accessible – akin to a visit to a friend’s home studio to see their latest works in progress and their developing ideas.
Ghanaian-British architect and exhibition designer Sir David Adjaye creates an unpretentious, open, and inviting series of spaces to consider the multi-sensory internal adventures of a young artist enthralled with possibilities that life may offer. The winding exhibition greets you in waves of illustrations, texts, canvasses, works on paper, paintings, family stories, sketchbooks, journals, artifacts, musical interludes, concise video interviews, projections, ephemera, arched porticos, subtly detailed environments in warmly authentic textures. Without clutter or fussy filigree, it also does not retreat to the clinical white box; instead, the varied collection achieves a cohesion that is authentic.
Basquiat was discovering and defining himself in an acutely racist US society that was in the process of merging and separating and reconfiguring, often painfully so. The contradictions of traversing street culture, middle-class economics, Haitian, Puerto Rican, African, and European roots were not new to him in our city – but he could not necessarily resolve them. Seeing his writings and paintings one may say that some of his clarity came from creating, an internal process of synthesis that he recorded externally in paint and pencil. Perhaps as a response to the thousand cuts that systemic racism inflicts and white people’s resistance to facing it, the show speaks to a still-ill society designed not to be safe or honest to black and brown men. Whether the racism he grapples with is historical or contemporary, can one doubt that Basquiat was deeply hurt by it? Textural references in what critic Carlo McCormick calls his “scattered poetics” illustrate the shock of sudden racism and class that rapidly veers to the next topic, possibly the nature of his daily existence.
Personal testimony by his sisters reminiscing on a video speaks to the stinging pain of racist words used against the family when all the siblings were children and how they witnessed his recoiling reaction. Even as you reflect upon his familiar names of musical and sports heroes popping up – Charlie Parker, Nat “King” Cole, Billy Eckstein, Grace Jones, and various Heavyweight Champs, it occurs to you that this young man was modeling himself after his heroes, as young people do. If there were few poets, intellectuals, or masters of industry referenced, perhaps that is the result of a system that primarily prized black men who were athletic or entertaining.
Writing of the Narrative
With King Pleasure, the family of the artist takes hold of the narrative and makes it personal, inviting you to see by recreating his family living spaces and his art studio. Each is filled with actual personal objects, family photographs, furniture, vinyl record albums, books, and ephemera. There is a natural tendency for us to view a person, a persona, and a creative life through our lenses of references – and much of the Basquiat hype that developed during his halcyon rise in the 1980s was formed by media and the cult of celebrity. From today forward those narratives will be broadened and more fully realized – at once providing context, answering questions and altering, even contesting, previously held perceptions. Without doubt, these will help us better appreciate the artworks and his practice.
At the opening Lisane Basquiat shared that their stepmother Nora Fitzpatrick told the sisters a couple of years ago that all these works had “been sitting in a vault for 30 something years”, and that was long enough. “They needed to be seen and shared with the world,” said Ms. Basquiat. This is possibly the most exciting aspect of the show – never seen before works, numbering about 200, anchor the collection, indicative of his prodigious output during his decade or so as a fine artist.
Works on canvas are sometimes stretched on found wood frames, others are wood canvasses. One may indeed be the last one he worked on. Seeing the collection is like discovering old friends you didn’t know about. Or maybe it is like receiving a letter from an old friend, a breath of fresh air that brightens the heart – and reinforces the beauty of the person and their significance in your life. Taken as one, this is bold, assured, and determined presentation of his work that never overshadows it by a family that respects Jean-Michel. Reassuringly, this newly unveiled collection affirms that his work is just as relevant to today’s culture as it was during his brief career and time on earth, having the courage to speak his piece.
With our social and economic progress so incremental and uneven, ever unjust, one can imagine that Basquiat might have been exhausted today in his 60s. As a cultural omnivore who took inspiration from everything around him, he may also have been buoyed by today’s beauty, encouraged by people’s determination to progress, and inspired by the still-bubbling sense of humor of his sisters, nieces, and nephews. Many of them attended the celebratory opening of the exhibition Thursday night at the Starrett-Lehigh. Their energy and tenderness toward one another and their grandmother were easily seen, with pleasure.
Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure, presented by the family of Jean-Michel Basquiat is currently open to the general public. Click HERE for tickets, schedule, and directions.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
