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Birth
Jean-Michel was born in Brooklyn, New York where he lived with his Puerto Rican mother and Haitian father. -
Car Accident
In September 1968, when Basquiat was about eight, he was hit by a car while playing in the street. In the hospital, his mother handed him a "Gray's Anatomy" book that influenced his later works showing the human anatomy. -
Dropped out of High School
In 1977, Basquiat quit high school a year before he was going to graduate. To make ends meet, he sold sweatshirts and postcards featuring his artwork on the streets of his native New York. -
SAMO Grafitti
This was one of the very first popular pieces that Jean-Michel created. With the help of his friend Al Diaz, the both of them created the Grafitti throughout lower Manhattan. -
Irony of the Negro Policeman
Jean-Michel is making a conscious effort to show how African-Americans are controlled by the white majority in America. The figure in the paintings is a totalitarian black mass, with a mask-like face and hat resembling a cage -
Untitled
This canvas piece was made in the middle of his career. This picture represents the ideals of African art that Jean modernized with his Neo-Expressionist style of thickly applied paint, rapidly rendered subjects, and scrawled linear characters, all of which float loosely across the pictorial field, as though hallucinatory -
Profit I
In this painting, Basquiat mixes the precedent of historical painting with urban graffiti to create a heroic character that is part self-portrait and part voodoo sham -
Hollywood Africans
Hollywood Africans is 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. For this painting he explained, "I cross out words so you will see them more; the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them.” -
Drug use began
By the mid-1980s, Jean-Michel's close friends began to realize his drug abuse problems. He became paranoid and isolated himself from the world around him. Desperate to kick a heroin addiction, he left New York for Hawaii in 1988, returning a few months later and claiming to be sober. -
Ten Punching Bags
Jean-Michel created this work with the help of Andy Warhol. Ten Punching Bags was to function, somewhat playfully, as a "call to arms" for contemporary art against all forms of ideological oppression. -
Riding With Death
This is an example of abstract art. Jean-Michel created this to define anti-blackness. Black people only have one recognized right in this world — the right to death. This was created on a canvas with acrylic and crayons. -
Death
Jean-Michel died from a drug overdose at the age of 26 in New York City.
