Reading Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat completed more than 1,500 works before his death at the age of twenty-seven. His unique compositions--collages of text and gestural painting across a variety of media--quickly made him one of the most important and widely known artists of the 1980s. Reading Basquiat provides a new approach to understanding the range and impact of Basquiat's practice, as well as its complex relationship to several key artistic and ideological debates of the late twentieth century, including the instability of identity, the role of appropriation, and the boundaries of expressionism. Jordana Moore Saggese argues that Basquiat, once known as "the Black Picasso," probes not only the boundaries of blackness but also the boundaries of American art. Weaving together the artist's interests in painting, writing, and music, this groundbreaking book expands the parameters of aesthetic discourse to consider the parallels Basquiat found among these disciplines in his exploration of the production of meaning.Most importantly, Reading Basquiat considers the ways in which Basquiat constructed large parts of his identity--as a black man, as a musician, as a painter, and as a writer--via the manipulation of texts in his own library.

"Amply illustrated . . . a lucid account that encourages the reader to look with refreshed eyes at the richness of the artist's work.", "Offers a compelling analysis that reveals and elucidates the complex language systems and cultural discourses at play in Basquiat’s work.", "In four chapters, the author gives the artist’s work the scholarly and historical attention it rightly deserves while contributing to the fields of American art, African American art, contemporary art, and diaspora art."

Jordana Moore Saggese is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art in the Visual Studies Program at California College of the Arts.

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