Who Is Basquiat?

During this week’s film assignment, I learned many new things about the famous artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Basquiat was born December 22, 1960, in Brooklyn, New York. He was well known as a graffiti artist as “SAMO” out on the streets selling various items such as postcards and sweatshirts that would display his artwork on them before his painting career would soon take off. During Basquiat early years growing up with his Haitian-American father and a Puerto Rican mother, his diverse culture heritage is what brought him so much inspiration. Growing up Basquiat was very much a self-taught artist, his father would bring him home paper to draw and make different forms of art on. He really enjoyed this and his mother encouraged him a lot of the
I really feel like Basquiat wanted people to see his work in different ways, for example, I believe that we wanted to give visual or tangible form to ideas, philosophies, or feelings by his artwork style. He created some really cool paintings that included “ Irony of the Negro Policeman” this piece of artwork showed Basquiat race and how African Americans are controlled by the white majority race in America. I think that the painting shows a lot of different things, It shows how the figure in the paintings is a totalitarian black mass, with a mask-like face and hat resembling a cage. I thought this was very interesting because I feel like he wanted people to see different emotions and race is his work because it was very important to him. I think it’s very sad how much Basquiat got involved with drugs after he found out about Andy Warhol's death. He died at such a young age of 27 years old from a heroin overdose on August 12, 1988, in New York after gaining so much fame and success. In my opinion I think Basquiat brought a lot of good in for the African-American and Latino experience in the art world by creating such meaningful and powerful pieces of