Jean-Michel Basquiat was a Haitian-American artist who first gained attention as part of SAMO, an informal graffiti duo known for its cryptic epigrams across Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In the late 1970s, the neighborhood became a cultural hotspot where hip-hop, post-punk, and street art converged. By the 1980s, Basquiat was exhibiting his Neo-Expressionist paintings in galleries and museums around the world, including a retrospective at the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art in 1992.
Basquiat’s artistic practice explored what have been called “suggestive dichotomies”: wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. He worked across media—poetry, drawing, and painting—blending text and image, abstraction and figuration, while weaving together historical references with sharp contemporary critique.
Basquiat used social commentary in his paintings as a “springboard to deeper truths about the individual,” while also critiquing power structures and systemic racism. His work was intensely political, directly confronting colonialism and advocating for class struggle. His life ended tragically in 1988, when he died of a heroin overdose in his studio at the age of 27.
Below, you can watch him in the process of creating his street art: