Jean-Michel+Basquiat

=__Jean-Michel Basquiat__= was chosen to represent not only the most iconic 1980s artist, but also the most cited African-American voice of the decade.

=__Facts:__=
 * Lived 1960-1988
 * Combined elements of the "African Diaspora" with the "graffiti movement" and his own unique symbology
 * 1980: His first art show in New York City, and he performs in a Jazz band called Gray
 * 1983: He meets and befriends Andy Warhol
 * 1984: Died of a drug overdose at the age of 27 after an extraordinary 8-year art career

__Quote from [|Basquiat.com]__ "In his short life (1960-1988), Jean-Michel Basquiat came to personify the art scene of the 80s, with its merging of youth culture, money, hype, excess, and self-destruction. And then there was the work, which the public image tended to overshadow: paintings and drawings that conjured up marginal urban black culture and black history, as well as the artist's own conflicted sense of identity. He was, all at once it seemed, the ultimate party animal, a wannabe streetkid and grafittist hiding his black Brooklyn middle class roots, an advocate and interpreter of the marginal and dispossessed at the court of the mainstream, an angry black aspirant to the all-white art canon, a precocious talent, a creature of cynical marketing and a fraud, a proto-muIticulturalist, an American original. "

Portrait of the Artist Artwork An Interview with the Artist A Clip From the Basquiat Movie = =

__Web sites for more information:__
[|Street to Studio: The Artwork of Basquiat] [|Wikipedia Entry for Basquiat]