The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York, NY (2026)

03/11/2026

In this rich, multi-layered painting from 1984, we come face-to-face with one of Jean-Michel’s most renowned motifs – his iconic heads. According to Christie’s:

“In this cacophonous composition, the viewer is confronted by the full force of Basquiat’s artistic dexterity. In many ways, this painting is dozens of works in one: Xeroxed sheets filled with expressive drawings, overlaid by two dramatic heads, and finally, a motif from Basquiat’s extensive mental library of advertisements and other commercial imagery, namely the titular bar of soap.

The Xeroxed sheets offer up an encyclopedic display of the depth and variety of Basquiat’s graphic initiative. Across the more than two dozen sheets, he renders a vast array of objects, both real and imagined. Ranging from fantastical creatures, anatomical renderings, drawings of money, and even firetrucks, these often very personal motifs are drawn from the artist’s lived experience plus his own fertile imagination.”

Artwork: Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Untitled (Soap),” 1983-1984.

03/09/2026

Jean-Michel Basquiat and Richard Pryor, photographed together in Los Angeles in 1982 by Margaret Goldsmith.

Two artists, two mediums, both using their craft to tell hard truths about race and identity in America without apology.

Pryor had already transformed stand-up comedy into something raw and necessary, using laughter to lay bare the realities of race and identity. Jean-Michel was building a visual language that was equally unsparing and impossible to ignore.

Photo: Margaret Goldsmith (1982), Courtesy of Fred Hoffman Fine Art.

03/06/2026

Looking for a fun, free, Friday evening activity in NYC? Head to the Whitney Museum of American Art, which offers complementary admission for all visitors weekly from 5-10 pm.

Included in the museum’s permanent collection is the 1983 masterpiece, “Hollywood Africans,” described on the Whitney’s website as “one of a series of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings that feature images and texts relating to stereotypes of African Americans in the entertainment industry.”

The Whitney continues, “It was painted while Basquiat was on an extended visit to Los Angeles, California, in 1983. Several of the work’s notations are autobiographical: the trio of figures on the right depicts the artist with the rap musician Rammellzee and the painter Toxic, who had traveled with him from New York, and he includes the digits of his birth date: 12, 22, and 60.”

“Other notations are historical: phrases such as ‘Sugar Cane,’ ‘Tobacco,’ ‘Gangsterism,’ and ‘What is Bwana?’ allude to the limited roles available to black actors in old Hollywood movies. The notion of exclusion or excision is reiterated in the way that Basquiat often crossed out words or phrases in his works. The technique, he explained, was actually meant to direct attention to them: ‘I cross out words so you will see them more; the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them.’”

Shown in the final image is Jean-Michel’s Hollywood Africans (1983) installed beside Andy Warhol’s Ethel Scull 36 Times (1963), a striking pairing not to be missed if you’re in the NYC area.

The Whitney recommends securing advance tickets, which can be booked online via Whitney.org.

Artworks Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Hollywood Africans,” (1983); Andy Warhol, “Ethel Scull 36 Times,” (1963).

Photo: Arlu Gomez, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2026.

03/04/2026

This portrait by photographer Tseng Kwong Chi featuring Jean-Michel was selected for the invitation to a photography group show at the Galerie Jerome de Noirmont in Paris, France, in 2002.

Other participating photographers included Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Richard Prince, Matthew Barney, Cindy Sherman, and William Wegman.

In the portrait, Jean-Michel stands in front of his painting, “To Be Titled,” looking slightly upward, calm and focused, while the artwork behind him bursts with color, text, and energy.

Tseng had a way of capturing artists in a straightforward, almost documentary style, letting the person and the work speak for themselves.

Both were key figures in the downtown New York scene, and this image feels like an understated but powerful record of that time. It is a portrait of an artist in his element, composed and fully present.

Artwork: Jean-Michel Basquiat, “To Be Titled,” (1987).

Photo: Tseng Kwong Chi, 1987.

03/02/2026

In the late 1970s, Jean-Michel was a founding member of the experimental noise band Gray, a downtown collective that blurred the lines between music, performance, and art. The band’s name itself was a nod to Gray’s Anatomy, a book that deeply influenced his visual vocabulary.

This rare first pressing of “Gray, Shades of…” is numbered from an edition of 1,000 and hand-signed by fellow band members Nick Taylor and Michael Holman. The cover design is made even more special as it features Jean-Michel’s distinct fingerprint.

Raw, atmospheric, and defiantly unpolished, Gray’s sound echoed the same restless energy that would later define Basquiat’s paintings.

During this early chapter of his career, Jean-Michel was already leaving his imprint in ink, paint, and sound.

Image: c/o Sotheby’s — Album cover art, “Gray, Shades of…”, featuring original artwork by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Numbered from an edition of 1,000.

02/27/2026

Here, Jean-Michel and fellow artist Julian Schnabel share a light moment at the height of the 1980s New York art explosion.

Both were stars of the downtown scene, each in his own orbit. Basquiat with his raw, urgent visual language. Schnabel with his monumental canvases and swaggering presence.

Together, they embodied a generation that redefined what contemporary art could look like.

Photo: Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Julian Schnabel at Mr. Chow, New York City, 1985.

02/25/2026

In 2015, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans presented the landmark exhibition, “Basquiat and the Bayou,” bringing together a focused selection of works that explored Jean-Michel’s engagement with the American South. As Hyperallergic reports:

“Curated by Prospect.3 artistic director Franklin Sirmans, who also co-curated the 2005 retrospective of Basquiat’s work that originated at the Brooklyn Museum, the nine paintings in Basquiat and the Bayou present a compact survey of various themes related to the American South, including jazz music, slavery and its legacy, race relations, and Afro-Caribbean influence that the artist explored over the course of his brief career.”

Hyperallergic continues, “The most powerful painting in the show, unusual for Basquiat, doesn’t contain any text at all: “Procession” (1986) depicts a row of starkly rendered individuals marching behind a lead figure brandishing a skull. In his catalogue essay, Sirmans likens the figures to slaves or workers in a prison gang; to a New Orleans eye, the figures also call to mind participants in a second line, the procession of mourners which follow the remains of the deceased in a traditional jazz funeral (and which has now been co-opted to celebrate everything from weddings to the opening of Prospect.3 itself).”

Artwork: Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Procession,” (1986).

02/23/2026

Here, Jean-Michel is photographed by Andy Warhol during a trip to Milan to attend his exhibition at the Galleria Salvatore Ala in 1983.

The visit coincided with one of the most intensely creative periods of Jean-Michel’s career, a moment when his visual language was expanding at full force. It also marked something larger.

By 1983, Jean-Michel had moved from downtown New York City into the international arena, with Europe embracing the urgency and brilliance of his work.

Photo: Andy Warhol (1983)

02/20/2026

This is Jean-Michel’s vibrant painting from 1987 entitled “Harlem Paper Products,” which was featured in a major exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in 2013. In an article for Flavorwire, Benjamin Sutton writes:

“The sheer amount of visual information in most of the pieces featured in the show is astounding, and will require multiple visits for close readers to process. Working on paper, doors, wooden boards, canvases crudely stretched over shipping palettes, and any other available material, incorporating painting, drawing, handwriting, and Xerox copies of his own work, Basquiat evidences, in the more than 60 paintings brought together from public and private collections for this show, a voracious appetite for incorporating disparate materials into his expansive lexicon.”

“On top of all these materials absorbed from the outside world, [Basquiat] developed an iconography all his own. Foremost among his signature motifs are the free-associative word strings and small crowns that were fixtures of his early street art and are peppered liberally throughout this show.

The 1987 painting ‘Harlem Paper Products,’ for instance, features the Dadaist sequence of words “Equator / Horizon / Tesla Coil / Glass Eye / Earwax / Lucha Libre.”

Sutton concludes, “With its encyclopedic system of references, signature images and inscrutable texts, Basquiat’s work epitomizes the maximalist tendencies of today’s visual culture.”

Artwork: Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Harlem Paper Products,” (1987).

Source: Benjamin Sutton for Flavorwire, “New Basquiat Exhibition Reveals the Master Behind the Hype,” February 14, 2013.

02/18/2026

Care to guess what Jean-Michel is spinning here in this 1981 photo by Chris Stein?

The shot was taken on the set of the video shoot for the song, “Rapture” by Blondie. Jean-Michel was asked to fill in for Grandmaster Flash, who was unable to participate.

The single would go on to make history as the first No. 1 hit in the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 to feature rap, and the first video that included rap to air on MTV.

Photos: Chris Stein (1981); Blondie, “Rapture” cover sleeve.

02/16/2026

This is Jean-Michel’s 1983 painting, “Early Moses,” described by Christie’s as “a vibrant example of [his] ability to converge personal, historical, and urban symbols into a commanding canvas of expressive color and painterly energy.”

Christie’s continues, “Basquiat was clearly fascinated by the story of Moses and the Egyptians and its allusion to the freeing of an enslaved people. This canvas, more than most Basquiat’s pieces, is, except for the use of the leg and foot, relatively literal—rather than deliberately cryptic or suggestive.”

“Although Early Moses is typical of Basquiat’s sophisticated work of the period, in which he employs endlessly surprising ways of meaningfully combining text and image, one can also think of this canvas as one that, perhaps unconsciously, merges symbols and narratives that belong to early Basquiat himself. In that sense Early Moses can be read, almost like a Rorschach test, as a reference to Basquiat’s own memories of childhood, when his mother taught him to heal himself through reading Gray’s Anatomy, and told him Bible stories which she illustrated on napkins.”

Artwork: Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Early Moses,” 1983.

02/13/2026

This 1986 portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat, photographed by Louis Jammes, takes on added meaning during Black History Month.

The word “ETYMOLOGY,” written directly onto the image, points to questions of language, origin, and authorship.

For Jean-Michel, words were a way to surface buried histories and challenge who gets to define them. Seen through this lens, the portrait becomes a meditation on Black identity, meaning, and self-definition.

Photo: Louis Jammes, (1986).

The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat