The first comprehensive collection of the words and works of a
movement-defining artist.
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) burst onto the art scene in the summer
of 1980 as one of approximately one hundred artists exhibiting at the
1980 Times Square Show in New York City. By 1982, at the age of
twenty-one, Basquiat had solo exhibitions in galleries in Italy, New
York, and Los Angeles. Basquiat's artistic career followed the rapid
trajectory of Wall Street, which boomed from 1983 to 1987. In the span
of just a few years, this Black boy from Brooklyn had become one of the
most famous American artists of the 1980s. The Jean-Michel Basquiat
Reader is the first comprehensive sourcebook on the artist, closing
gaps that have until now limited the sustained study and definitive
archiving of his work and its impact.
Eight years after his first exhibition, Basquiat was dead, but his
popularity has only grown. Through a combination of interviews with the
artist, criticism from the artist's lifetime and immediately after,
previously unpublished research by the author, and a selection of the
most important critical essays on the artist's work, this collection
provides a full picture of the artist's views on art and culture, his
working process, and the critical significance of his work both then and
now.