Jean Michel Basquiat

this the only truly psychedelic book I’ve ever read.

Jean-Michel Basquiat painted 'Defacement' (The Death of Michael Stewart) in 1983 to commemorate the death of a young, black artist who died from injuries sustained while in police custody after being arrested for allegedly tagging a New York City subway station. Published to accompany a focused exhibition of Basquiat's response to anti-black racism and police brutality, this catalogue explores a chapter in the artist's career through both the lens of his identity and the Lower East Side as a nexus of activism in the early 1980s.

168 p. : 24 cm

New York City graffiti artist turned art world sensation, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a self-taught African American painter who died in 1988 of a drug overdose at the age of 27. In the ten years before his death, he showed at prestigious galleries in the United States and Europe and painted collaborative works with Andy Warhol and Francesco Clemente. This catalog accompanies a Basquiat exhibition in Trieste and features fine reproductions of major Basquiat paintings, along with portrait photographs of the artist, a chronology of his life, and essays and interviews .

This carefully reproduced facsimile edition of renowned visual artist Basquiat's eight notebooks provides us a glimpse into the mind of a visionary artist. On nearly every page, readers will ponder over why and how Basquiat chose to string together these specific words and often bizarre phrases. The notebooks function as a sort of incubator for Basquiat's artistic process as well as a finished product in their own right.