Jean-Michel Basquiat

Born in Brooklyn to a bourgeois family of Haitian and Puerto Rican origin, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a precocious child who gave up formal education at 16 to join New York’s underground as a graffiti artist. Basquiat, a trailblazer of the Neo-expressionism movement during the 1980s, gained acclaim for his radical, expressionistic pieces that passionately called for the recognition of oppressed groups, denouncing racism, colonization, and capitalist domination.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s meteoric rise to fame in the late 1970s marked him as a leading figure in the East Village art scene. In 2017, his 1982 masterpiece, ‘Untitled‘, depicting a black skull with red and yellow sold for a record-breaking auction price of $110.5 million, solidifying Basquiat’s position as one of the most influential American artists.