El Gran Espectáculo: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Modernity, Modernism (2018) Available to Purchase

This essay was written for the exhibition Jean-Michel Basquiat, curated by Dieter Buchhart and Olivier Michelon and shown at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, from March 2018 to January 2019. This is another detailed analysis of the life’s work of, in this case, the most celebrated artist of his generation. Noting the usual origin story in Basquiat’s graffiti, Okwui Enwezor emphasizes instead his first paintings of the early 1980s as setting the terms of his subsequent practice. The diasporic, Black Atlantic content as expressed in art, music, and other cultural forms in the United States is emphasized and traced in paintings made until the artist’s death in 1988.