Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in New York City in 1960 and died in 1988. Basquiat began his artistic career writing graffiti under the street name “SAMO”. As his practice became more refined he began to incorporate his graffiti into fully formed paintings depicting a widely varied subject matter that included both text and pictorial imagery.
Basquiat’s work has been presented at major institutions worldwide, including the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Menil Collection, Houston; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, Alabama; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
Basquiat’s work is featured in many prominent museum collections worldwide, including the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich; Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn; Daros Collection, Zurich; Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice; Fukuoka Art Museum, Fukuoka; Guggenheim Bilbao; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Hoffman Collection, Berlin; Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen; Menil Collection, Houston; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Musee d’Art Contemporain, Marseilles; Musée du Luxembourg, Paris; Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham; Portland Art Museum, Portland; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.