Born on December 22, 1960, in Flatbush, Brooklyn, to Puerto Rican and Haitian parents, Basquiat grew up in a middle-class, but unstable, family environment. After his parents separated and his mother was hospitalized for depression, he left home in his teens and couch-surfed and slept on the streets of New York’s Lower East Side, where graffiti, punk, hip-hop and club culture were forging a gritty, vibrant scene.
By the mid-1970s, Basquiat and high school classmate Al Diaz began adorning downtown walls and subways with cryptic sayings and witticisms, accompanied by the graffiti tag duo SAMO© (short for “Same Old Sh—”). It became a buzzy art-world mystery that gave him instant notoriety once he finally claimed authorship.
Basquiat first exhibited his own solo artwork at the groundbreaking 1980 “Times Square Show,” alongside other emerging figures like Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, who had similar roots in downtown street art. For the show, he painted a mural on a patch of wall, wowing critics with its expressive energy. The following year, more than 20 of his pieces became a focal point of the exhibit "New York/New Wave" at contemporary art space P.S. 1, a major career milestone. The exposure helped him secure dealer representation for his work and pushed his art-making off the streets and into the studio environment.
Basquiat, barely out of his teens, rose quickly to become a global art star, as galleries and museums around the world began exhibiting his work and collectors clamored for his paintings. They became known for their visual power: vivid colors, jagged lines, scattered text and crude yet expressive figures layered in compositions that struck a balance between chaos and control. Thematically, his canvases teemed with cultural references, from jazz legends to boxing heroes. And many included biting social commentary about difficult topics like slavery and police brutality.
"The Black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings,'' he told The New York Times. ''I realized that I didn't see many paintings with Black people in them,” referring to the almost exclusively white domain of New York’s contemporary art scene.
In 1985, a shoeless, Armani-clad Basquiat, a few years from living in the streets, graced the cover of The New York Times Magazine. The story, titled “New Art, New Money,” anointed the 24-year-old as the darling of the downtown art scene. He developed a friendship and collaboration with famed Pop artist Andy Warhol, then a legendary figure in that world.
But fame brought pressure. Basquiat, pushed to keep up with brisk demand for his work and deeply frustrated by feelings of racial tokenism—of being a gallery "mascot"—fell into drug addiction. “They still call me a graffiti artist,” he told Vanity Fair. “They don’t call Keith [Haring] or Kenny [Scharf] graffiti artists anymore.” Reviews included racially loaded language like “primitive,” “fetish” and “tough street-voodoo artist.” One collector couple came to his studio bearing a bucket of fried chicken. And since New York taxis would rarely stop for a Black man—no matter their wealth or fame—he resorted to traveling largely by limousine.
Suffering from a reported $500-a-day heroin habit, Basquiat overdosed 10 days before a planned trip aimed at curing his addiction.
He left behind an impressive legacy for an artist so young—according to the Brant Foundation Art Study Center, more than 1,000 paintings and 2,000 drawings. Since then, his legacy has not dimmed: In pop culture, hip-hop figures including Jay-Z, Nas and Lil Wayne have name-checked him in their lyrics. Ye (formerly Kanye West) prominently featured Basquiat's famed crown motif in his tour merchandise. Fashion brands from Gucci to Uniqlo have released collections inspired by his art.
Meanwhile, hundreds of museum shows and a handful of eye-popping auction sales have kept his work in the top tier of the art world. In 2016, one of his coveted “Head” paintings sold at auction for $57.3 million. A year later, his work “Untitled” fetched $110.5 million, an auction record for an American artist. The sale, one dealer said, put Basquiat in “the same league” as Pablo Picasso.
