.

Tabac
 1984. Acrylic and oil crayon on canvas, 219x173 cm. Private collection. Photo: Cortesy of Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich




Royalty, Heroism, and the Streets: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat



By Robert Farrais Thompson

"My fire can swim me through the frigid water."
Francisco de Quevedo, Amor constante mas allž de la muerte (1)

Some say New York was founded as a way station to the West Indies. Nothing has changed. In the fifties the city rocked to an Afro-Cuban mambo beat (2). Around 1970 a New York-West Indian dance music emerged. It was built on mambo, with jazz trombones blended in. The latinos called it salsa, tremors of which registered, as if upon a seismograph, in 1972:

"Already large chunks of Manhattan have a (...) tropical feel (...). Ecu-adorians are in the streets of Sunnyside; Argentinians read La Prensa on the Flushing IRT. Congas [are played] on the Concourse." (3)

Afro-latinization of New York in the seventies was not only visible. It was an augury:

"Those who kept close to the [Afro-Latin] streets (...) preserved the se-eds of something authentic within themselves. In their refusal to act European, in their struggle to wrest some tropical essence from the stiff and aging baffles of this city, they built the foundation for what seems destined to become the next great subculture [sic] of New York." (4)

In 1977-80 that "next great culture" pulled into station, "hip-hop": bre-ak dance, electric boogie, graffiti, rap (5). The women and men of hip-hop were Anglo-phonic Caribbean and mainland black as well as New York Puerto Rican. This reflected new immigration patterns since 1966. In addition, the Haitian presence burgeoned to the point where by 1985 major dance bands from Port-au-Prince routinely worked the ballro-oms of Queens and Brooklyn.

A crisscross of island-mediated African influences now illuminated New York: Afro-Cuban, Afro-Haitian, Afro-Jamaican, Afro-Dominican and Afro-Puerto Rican. Creole Africa, to the power of five, intensifying the earlier gifts of Garvey, Parker, Coltrane and Malcolm X.

This was the New York into which Jean-Michel Basquiat was born on December 22, 1960. With a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, he was part of the process.

Manhattan remains, of course, forever the island of Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Wall Street, and Rockefeller Center. Above and beyond these bastions of white power, however, new foci have emerged. In Brooklyn, Queens, the Lower East Side and Morningside Heights, multiple streams of sub-Saharan and Western influence converge at every minute of every day.

There is no "mainstream" in New York. Jean-Michel, in the depth of his work, makes us question that buzzword, makes us probe its exclusionist dynamic to the core.

His is a quest for a sharper, ecumenical assessment of the troubling - yet promising - configurations of our urban destiny and predicament.

In any event, it was inevitable that a gifted artist would make sense of the challenge of this ferment, as Wifredo Lam shaped together modernist Paris and Afro-Cuban Havana, as Borges tempered Buenos Aires' miming of the French with the he-roism and machismo of the tango which he discovered in the barrios.

New York Caribbean style, vivid and sensuous, plus the hard-working ethic that brought the tropical men and women to New York City in the first place were catalysts that transformed a brilliant young Haitian-Puerto Rican person of artistic bent, Jean-Michel Basquiat, into one of the celebrated painters of his age. Other forces behind his rise included the richness of North American black culture - with mid-century jazz as a major influence - and the stimuli of museums, books, films, art openings, opera, salsa dance halls, blues and zydeco concerts - a gamut of parallel traditions.

As we come to grips with the life and style of Jean-Michel Basquiat we note his famous painted texts. His words embody cultural directives and deductions. They reveal the multilingual power of New York. In the process, Basquiat voiced feelings about being black and being an artist in the most glamorous city in the world.

The texts in his paintings are, among many things, brave essays in cultural self-definition. They reflect not only the books he read and the worlds he lived in - middle-class Haitian Brooklyn, The Brooklyn Museum, the graffitero streets, the music of his own "noise-band," and the Soho art scene; more critically, they reflect how he ma-de sense of all those realms.


Basquiat's Cultural Formation

Start with his parents. Basquiat's well-dressed, hard-working, tough-minded, ambitious father, Gerard, set examples of style, heart, and drive. Succeeding, as an accountant, in both white and black New York, playing tennis, living well, he exuded confidence. He came from a well-to-do family in Haiti. Haitians, in their northern diaspo-ra, Montreal to Miami, made their mark. Gerard exemplified that ethic.

True, Jean-Michel dropped out of school in 1977. He became a street artist, specializing in droll and trenchant texts, written on the walls. He signed them with his friend, Al Diaz, Samo. But something like his father's drive enlivened these outwardly bohemian gestures. For Jean-Michel planted his street texts not just anywhere, but pre-dominantly along the strategic byways of Soho and the East Village, sometimes even at art openings. Here, he knew, they were bound to be seen by influential people. They were not only social texts. They also constituted, in the purest Norman Mailer sense, adverti-sements for himself.

Some critics extrapolate from Jean-Michel's Haitian name knowledge of Haiti and the religion of the Haitian masses, vodun, or "voodoo" as they put it. It isn't true. Jean-Michel never traveled to Haiti. Jean-Michel never spoke Krëyol (Creole), the language of the Haitian people. He was closer to his Puerto Rican mother, Matilde.

She spoke Caribbean Spanish to him. Jean-Michel spoke to her in Spa-nish (6). She took Jean-Michel to see museums and the paintings in them - in 1966, at the age of six, he already had a card identifying him as a "junior member" of The Brooklyn Museum (7).

In 1974 Gerard Basquiat, now separated from Matilde, moved with his children to Puerto Rico. They lived there until 1976. This year and a half immersion, when Jean-Michel was in his early teens, reinforced his Spanish. So did subsequent vaca-tions on the island, including one in 1987.

From childhood on Jean-Michel "read tremendously." (8) Both parents encouraged this passion. In 1968, while he was playing softball on East 35th Street in Brooklyn, a passing automobile hit Basquiat (9). Surgeons had to remove his spleen. While he was recovering in the hospital, his mother brought him a copy of Gray's Ana-tomy to read (10). It was an extraordinary present to give a patient.

Matilde, in a sense, had with affection commanded her son to study his body back together again. She was also encouraging his artistic interests, aware that Mi-chelangelo and all great painters had studied anatomy.

In March 1987 I asked Jean-Michel if he thought Gray's text helped heal, immersing his consciousness in drawings and names of the working parts of the human body. He answered :"Sounds true."

In sum, from his father Jean-Michel learned confidence and toughness. From his mother he learned how to place this toughness in a creative presence. To her he owed one of the running aspects of his iconography - that diagnostic medicine connects with texts and drawings.

As his body slowly mended, Basquiat knew that the surgeon's knowledge of the totality of his body lay behind the successful completion of the operati-on. Out of trauma, assuaged by love and knowledge, emerged an artist's connection to texts and drawings of anatomy.

But we will come to recognize the changing nuances and ambition im-parted to this passion: Basquiat's essays in anatomy, in their jazz-riff manner of expositi-on, are style and content in service to healing on a heroic scale. Moreover, we shall see a lot of humor, too, blending constancy with contingency and episode.

He deals with more than bones and texts. He confronts the anatomy of the city at its racial, linguistic, and cultural cutting edges. He gives you influences in con-flict, and casts them into coherence. And we are the ones who benefit, not he, destroyed by one of the more virulent "disease cultures" of the streets: heroin.

Growing up in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, Basquiat heard people "role-switch" all the time. On the street his peers might effortlessly shift from standard English (before strangers) to black English (among friends) and back again (11). In his own style of speech Jean-Michel carried role-switching to another level. Words from dual realms, hip and straight, black and white, fused in his idiom. He spoke this blended diction with the same intonation, whether he was hanging out with Rammellzee, wizard of the graffi-teros, or talking business with the famous gallery owner Mary Boone. "Jean-Michel," his close friend Michael Holman recalls, "never distorted himself" (12).

Those who hung on Jean-Michel's every word at the Mudd Club, who played in or listened to his band, who watched him make grand entrances with Haring and Warhol at downtown clubs and restaurants, rarely understood that Jean-Michel was as fluent in Spanish as he was in English. Wherever Iberian and Anglo-Saxon came to-gether, on the streets of Chelsea, the Bowery, or the Lower East Side, he was ready. When Spanish was the move, everything turned Afro-Caribbean - accent, diction, pacing, intonation. Thus Jean-Michel gracefully embodied the power to deal with history and facts in several languages.

His paintings are therefore not about "knowledge" from a single con-text, not when confronted with New York's mad mix of attitudes and idioms. Jean-Michel blended and confronted what was traditional and best in his cultural experience, like jazz and blues and opera, with what was exciting in terms of the popular technologies seething all around him.

In the process, Basquiat indelibly transformed the imagination of twentieth-century American art. Yet some critics misplace the point. Didactically, they place his genius in single pigeonholes: Haitian "primitive"; barrio naÅf; phenomenon of arrested childhood; on and on.

Yet the charismatic accuracy of his eye stems from his own solution to the central problem of the West today: urgent need of intelligences other than our own. He started this multilingual work, an imaginative alliance of knowledge with play, ques-ting remorselessly for continuance.

In spite of these complexities, typographic, linguistic, painterly - or be-cause of them - the relationship of Basquiat to certain critics remains quite problematic. His tragic death, on August 12, 1988, from a drug overdose, plus ongoing nonsense about his "street origins," grants these writers open license, or so they think, to handle his repu-tation in a sensationalist manner.

Fortunately, important critics, including Greg Tate, Rene Ricard, Ju-dith McWillie, Lucy Lippard, Jeffrey Deitch, Mark Francis, Robert Storr, Charles Me-rewether and John Russell, note the astonishing fluency of his mind in action. (...) Gerar-do Mosquera, a Cuban art critic, compared him to Wifredo Lam.


Arguments and Achievements

Understanding the art of Jean-Michel depends in part on understanding his lifelong involvement with music - literally his working ambient. Jazz and blues are prominent, consciously chosen Afro-Atlantic roots. They appear as content, they appear as names, they appear as style. In addition, a fraction of the pranking genius of his "noise band," Gray, turned during 1979-80 irreducible, and reappeared, specific and intact, as style and subject matter in his paintings.

Respecting another telling redundancy, one ignores Basquiat's attempt to sever relations with his graffitero past, as his reputation soared and his painting got in gear. For the subway crown motif - "king of the line" - is always there. And so are equi-valents to his wall texts, albeit orchestrated at thoroughly musicalized, multistatement levels.

The icon of the crown haunts Basquiat's quintessential answer to a question once posed by Henry Geldzahler: "What is your subject matter?" Basquiat: "Royalty, heroism, and the streets." (13)

Geldzahler's interview includes important passages in which Jean-Michel talks about "high" and "popular" sources in his work. Franz Kline, he revealed, was "one of my favorites." He said he had no idea what Haitian art was (that assumption again) "but wanted [in his youth] to be a cartoonist," and that his "favorite Twombly is Apollo and the Artist with the big 'Apollo' written across it." (14)

Discourse fails again if Basquiat's sophisticated range of visual loves - including Kline, Twombly, and the comics - is censored in an attempt to make him an Afro-Mowgli, untutored wolf-child of the Brooklyn streets. Basquiat gave Twombly such a close reading, in fact, that it could be argued that one of the sources for his penchant for erasure stemmed from the latter's 1970 Untitled (Study for Treatise on the Veil).

When Jean-Michel gets going, however, Twombly's creams and grays vanish in the maelstrom of Afro-Atlantic vividness. His brilliantly color-syncopated Zydeco of 1984, compared to Twombly's Treatise, shows that Jean-Michel cancels to reveal: "I cross out words so you will see them more; the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them." (15) Whereas Twombly really cancels.

The choice of Kline as source is culturally appropriate. Kline, after all, was flourishing when mambo took New York, when virtually everyone in the arts eventually went to the Palladium mambo show at Broadway and 53rd on Wednesdays.

Spiritual affinity, at the very least, links Kline's athletic black diagonals, present in all their hellishly so-called calligraphic power in Dahlia of 1959, and the comparably strong and slashing New York mambo danced by the great Anìbal Vžsquez in 1959.

The inherent energy and attitude of Kline (16), a former athlete, complements the tumult and pulsation of Basquiat.

Skin Head Wig, executed in the winter of 1982, exemplifies Basquiat's mastery of Abstract Expressionism and other sources. A dark stroke Ç la Kline surmounts a fragment of his own cartoonlike collage, like a finial on a skyscraper. He seals the abstract element with a Twombly-like cipher. Writing ethereal Twombly over macho Kline was a witty contrast in itself.

Meanwhile the cartoon blocks themselves also conceal playful allusions to "arte erudita." One finds Degas' dancer, rendered in pink, hidden between laughter from a comic (HEE HEE HEE HEE HEE) and a bird and a cross within an S for Superman. There are also two images of "Venus" - "just a sensuous art object thrown in." (17)

The lush abstractions, in black and brown, appear in equality with the pulse of print and figuration. Visual and verbal meet like storm clouds over city. Mixing street and museum, vernacular and standard, Basquiat seemingly suggests, "dismiss any of this and you've dismissed New York."

Western modernist influences abound in Jean-Michel's work. They extend into areas where we do not have a statement by the artist to guide the argument. Here style alone suggests a source.

From painting to painting we recognize a major source of power: self-creolization. This simply means being fluent in several languages and knowing how to fuse them to effect.

Watch him letter in words in English, plus Spanish, plus a little Italian, the latter voicings reflecting his connections with the art world of that country, while painting Afro-Atlantic random accentuations in design. Or consider, in an untitled painting, a characteristic high-octane blend of allusions to science (Radium), heroic testing of boundaries (Icarus), Afro-Atlantic stylization (various masks and skulls), heroes of exploration, both literal and in terms of classical black music (Marco Polo, Miles Davis). He cites all that against the focusing power of t

Notes

1. Cited in The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987 (New York: New Directions, 1987), p. 83
2. An era brilliantly evoked by Oscar Hijuelos in The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1989).
3. Richard Goldstein, "The Big Mango," New York, August, 7, 1972, p. 26.
4. ibid., p. 24.
5. I provide a brief sketch of the historical background of breaking and electric boogie choreography in "Hip-Hop 101," Rolling Stone, March 27, 1986, pp. 95-100. I discuss the impact of hip-hop dancing on the studio art of Keith Haring in a piece called "Requiem for the Degas of the B-Boys," Artforum, 28 (May 1990), pp. 135-41. See also David Toop, The Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip Hop (London: Pluto Press, 1984), and Nelson George et al., Fresh: Hip Hop Don't Stop (New York: Random House, 1985).
6. Telephone conversation with Jean-Michel Basquiat. March 1987.
7. I am indebted to Gerard Basquiat for sharing with me his discovery of this card among the personal effects of his son. He also shared data about Jean-Michel's voyages to Puerto Rico.
8. Telephone conversation with Gerard Basquiat, April 1992.
9. ibid.
10. Phoebe Hoban, "SAMO"... Is Dead: The Fall of Jean-Michel Basquiat," New York, September 26, 1988, p. 39: "[Basquiat] later told an interviewer that Gray's anatomy, which his mother had given him during his recovery, was an early influence on his work."
11. As remembered by Gerard Basquiat, in conversation with the author, March 1992.
12. Telephone conversation with Michael Holman, May 1992.
13. Henry Geldzahler, "Art: From Subways to Soho, Jean-Michel Basquiat," Interview, 13 (January 1983), p. 46.
14. ibid.
15. From a conversation with Jean-Michel Basquiat, early March 1987.
16. See, for exemple, Albert Boime, in Boime and Fred Mitchell, Franz Kline: The Early Works as Signals, exh. cat. (Binghamton University Art Gallery, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1977)
17. Interview with Jean-Michel Basquiat, March 1987.
18. Robert Storr, introduction to John Cleim, ed., Jean-Michel Basquiat: Drawings, exb. cat. (New York: Robert Miller Gallery, 1990), n.p.
19. The Elder Edda, trans. Paul B. Taylor and W.H. Auden (New York: Vintage, 1970), p. 44.
20. Storr, Jean-Michel Basquiat, alluding to the same aspect, calls it "eye-rap."
21. Robert Farris Thompson, "Break-Shadow Art (Pžsula Kini): Towards an African Reading of Modernist Primitivism," in Gerald Berjonneau and Jean-Louis Sonnery, eds., Rediscovered Masterpieces (Paris: Fondation Dapper, 1987), p.72: "Cubism, translated into Kongo traditionalist terms, is break-shadow art, the debating of form with shadowed facets."
22. Cathleen McGuigan, "New Art, New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist," The New York Times Magazine, February 10, 1985, p.31.
23. ibid.
24. Quoted in Geldzahler, "Art," p. 46
25. Toni Morrison, Jazz (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 53. The jazz works examined are but a sampling. Other paintings relate, directly or indirectly, to jazz. Brain, for example, of 1985, includes painted evocations of 78rpm jazz records, as does Bird of Paradise of 1984, and others.
26. Stearns. The Story of Jazz, p. 228.
27. ibid.
28. ibid.
29. Conversation with Jean-Michel Basquiat, March 1987.



































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Chronology
Born on December 22, 1960, in Brooklyn, New York. Died on August 12, 1988.


Solo exhibitions

1996
Basquiat, Serpentine Gallery, London, England; Jean-Michel Basquiat: Bodies and Heads, Unpublished drawings from the Estate, Robert Miller Gallery, New York, USA.
1995
Two Cents: Works on Paper by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Poetry by Kevin Young, Centre Gallery, Miami-Dade Community College/Wolfon Campus, USA.
1994/95
Jean-Michel Basquiat Works in Black and White, Robert Miller Gallery, New York, USA; Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Blue Ribbon Series, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, USA.
1994
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, USA; Jean-Michel Basquiat, Johnson County Community College Gallery of Art, Overland Park, USA.
1993/94
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Musëe-galerie de la Seita, Paris, France; Jean-Michel Basquiat, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, USA.
1993
Galerie Delta Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Salon De Mars, Paris; Jean-Michel Basquiat, Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, USA; Jean-Michel Basquiat, Musëe d'Art Contemporain, Pully/Lausanne, Switzerland.
1992/94
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA.
1992/93
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA; (installation of Nu-Nile, 1985, and Untitled - Palladium Painting, 1985, on 2nd floor of Lila Acheson Wallace Wing).
1992
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Vrej Baghoomian Gallery, New York, USA; Jean-Michel Basquiat, Musëe Cantini, Marseille, France; Jean-Michel Basquiat, Galerie Eric van de Weghe, Brussels, Belgium.
1991
Jean-Michel Basquiat: Oil Paintings, Drawings etc, PS Gallery, Tokio, Japan.
1990
Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Survey of Drawings, Robert Miller Gallery, New York, USA; Jean-Michel Basquiat: Oeuvres sur papier, Galerie Le Gall Peyroulet, Paris, France; Basquiat, Galerie Fabien Boulakia, Paris, France.
1989
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Vrej Baghoomian Gallery, New York, USA; Jean-Michel Basquiat, Galerie Enrico Navarra, Paris, France; Jean-Michel Basquiat: Das Zeichnerische Werk, Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover, Germany.
1988/98
Jean-Michel Basquiat: Memorial Exhibition, Annina Nosei Gallery, New York, USA.
1988
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris, France; Jean-Michel Basquiat: Peintures 1982-1987, Galerie Beauborg, Paris, France; Jean-Michel Basquiat: Neue Arbeiten, Galerie Hans Mayer, DÆsseldorf, Germany; Jean-Michel Basquiat, Galerie Michael Hass, Berlin, Germany; Jean-Michel Basquiat, Vrej Baghoomian Gallery, New York, USA; Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings-Drawings, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, Austria; Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings, Gallery Schlesinger Limited, New York, USA.
1987
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, France; Jean-Michel Basquiat: New Works, Akira Ikeda Gallery, Tokio, Japan; Jean-Michel Basquiat: Drawings, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, USA; Jean-Michel Basquiat: Drawings, PS Gallery, Tokio, Japan.
1986/87
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, Germany.
1986
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Larry Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles, USA; Jean-Michel Basquiat: Drawings, Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich, Switzerland; Jean-Michel Basquiat - Bilder 1984-86, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, Austria; Jean-Michel Basquiat: Drawings, Fay Gold Gallery, Atlanta, USA; J.M. Basquiat, Centre Culturel Franceis d'Abidijian, Ivory Coast; Jean-Michel Basquiat, Galerie Delta, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
1985/86
Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings from 1982, Annina Nosei Gallery, New York, USA.
1985
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich, Switzerland; Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mary Boone-Michel Werner Gallery, New York, USA; Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings, Akira Ikeda Gallery, Tokio, Japan; Jean-Michel Basquiat, University Art Museum, University of Calilfornia, Berkeley, USA.
1984/85
Jean-Michel Basquiat Paintings 1981-1984, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edimburg, Scotland.
1984
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mary Boone-Michael Werner Gallery, New York, USA; Jean-Michel Basquiat: New Paintings, Carpenter & Hochman, Dallas, USA.
1983
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich, Switzerland; Jean-Michel Basquiat, Akira Ikeda Gallery, Tokio, Japan; Jean-Michel Basquiat: New Paintings, Larry Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles, USA; Jean-Michel Basquiat, Annina Nosei Gallery, New York, USA.
1982
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Annina Nosei Gallery, Los Angeles, USA; Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings, Larry Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles, USA; Jean-Michel Basquiat, Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich, Switzerland; Jean-Michel Basquiat, Galleria Mario Diacono, Rome, Italy; Jean-Michel Basquiat, Fun Gallery, New York, USA; Jean-Michel Basquiat, Galerie Delta, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
1981
SAMO, Gallerie d'Arte Emilio Mazzoli, Modena, Italy.


Group exhibitions

1996
Thinking Print: The Role of Prints and Illustrated Books in Contemporary Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA.
1995
Drawing the Line, Southampton City Art Gallery, England; Essence and Persuasion: The Power of Black and White, Anderson Gallery, Buffalo, USA; Home is Where..., Weatherspoon Art Gallery, UNC at Greensboro, USA.
1994/95
Corpus Imperfectus: The figure in Contemporary Art, Montgomery Glasoe Fine Art, Minneapolis, USA.
1994
The Ossuary, Luhring Augustine, New York, USA; The Shaman as Artist/The Artist as Shaman, Aspen Art Museum, CO, USA; Les Temps d'un Dessin, Galerie de L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Lorient, France; Against All Odds: The Healing Powers of Art, The Ueno Royal Museum, Tokio, Japan; Art in the Present Tense: The Aldrich's Curatorial History 1964-1994, The Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, USA.
1993
Here's Looking At Me: Contemporary Self Portrait, Art Contemporain, Lyon, France; Collage and Assemblage, Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., New York, USA; Extravagant: The Economy of Elegance, Kulturzentrum der Russischen F•deration, Berlin, Germany; Drawing the Line Against AIDS, Peggy Guggenhein Collection, Venice, Italy (reinstalled at the Guggenhein Museum Soho, New York, USA); Abstract-Figurative, Robert Miller Gallery, New York, USA; Windows and Doors, Holly Solomon Gallery, New York, USA; Et Tous ils Changent le Monde, Biennale d'Art Contemporain, Lyon, France.
1992/94
Dream Singers, Story Tellers: An African-American Presence, Fukui Fine Arts Museum, organized by the News Jersey State Museum.
1992/93
20th Century Masters: Works on Paper, Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, USA.
1992
Allegories of Modernism: Contemporary Drawings, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; An Exhibition for Satyajit Ray, Philippe Briet Gallery, New York, USA; Images of Children, The Peck School, Morriston, USA; The Power of the City/The City of Power, Whitney Museum of American Art, Downtown Branch, New York, USA; Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jonathan Borofsky, Richard Bosman, Kang So Lee, Terry Winters, Haenah-Kent Gallery, New York, USA; Paris Connections: African American Artists in Paris, Bomani Gallery and Jernigan Wicker Fine Arts, San Francisco, USA; Passions and Cultures: Selected Works from the Rivendell Collection, 1967-1991, The Richard and Marieluise Black Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, USA; Gifts and Acquisitions in Context, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; X Mostra da Gravura Cidade de Curitiba/Mostra Amërica, Fundaçâo Cultural de Curitiba/Museu da Gravura, Curitiba, Brazil; Baziotes to Basquiat... and Beyond, Bellas Artes, Santa Fë, USA; Emerging New York Artists: An Exhibit of Selected Works from the Collection of Phil Schrager, Fine Arts Building, College of Fine Arts, University of Nebraska at Omaha, USA; Ars Pro Domo, Geselleschaft fÆr Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig, K•ln, Germany.
1991/92
Devil on the Stairs: Looking Back on the Eighties, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA; Art of the 1980s Selections from the Collection of the Eli Broad Family Foundation, Duke University Museum of Art, Durham, NC, USA; American Artists of the 80's, Pallazo delle Albere, Museo Provinciale d'Arte Sezione Contemporanea, Trento, Italy; Domenikos Theotokopoulos: A Dialogue, Philippe Briet Gallery, New York, USA; A Passion for Art: Watercolors and Works on Paper, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, USA; Works on Paper, Annina Nosei Gallery, New York, USA.
1991
Words & #, Museum of Contemporary Art, Wright State University, Dayton, USA; An Aspect of Contemporary Art, Setagaya Art Museum, Tokio, Japan; The 1980s: A Selected View from the Permanent Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; Drawings Acquisitions, 1980-1991: Selections from the Permanent Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Whitney Museum of Art at Philip Morris, New York, USA; Compassion and Protest: Recent Social and Political Art from the Eli Broad Familly Foundation Collection, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, USA; Portraits on Paper, Robert Miller Gallery, New York, USA; Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sonje Museum of Contemporary Art, Kyongju, Korea; Selected Works, Enrico Works, Navarra Gallery, New York, USA; Mito y magia en Amërica: Los ochenta, Museo de Arte Contemporžneo de Monterrey, Mexico.
1990/91
Language in Art, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT, USA; Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, USA.
1990
Selected Works, The Greenberg Gallery, St. Louis, USA; Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, Ho-Am Gallery, Seul, Korea; Par Hazard: A Changing Installation of Recent Acquisitions, Douglas Drake Gallery, New York, USA; 21 Jahre Internationale Kunstmesee Basel - Art 21'90, Galerie Hans Mayer DÆsseldorf at Basel Art Fair, Switzerland; Faces, Marc Richards Gallery, Los Angeles, USA; Summer Works on Paper, Fay Gold Gallery, Atlanta, USA; The Last Decade: American Artists of the 80's, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, USA; Works on Paper, Cavaliero Fine Arts, New York, USA; Quickdraw American Drawings since 1959, Frank Bernarducci Gallery, New York, USA; Selection Americaine, Galerie Hadrien-Thomas, Paris, France; Gesture & Signature, Michael Kohn Gallery, Santa M–nica, USA; The Decade Show: Frame works of Identity in the 1980s, Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlen, New York, USA; Pharmakon '90, Nippon Convention Center, International Exhibition Hall, Tokio, Japan.
1989/90
The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism, The Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, DC, USA.
1989
Modern and Contemporary Master Drawings, Rosa Esman Gallery, New York, USA; Words, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, USA; A Decade of American Drawing 1980-1989, Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles, USA; The Chase Manhattan Bank Collection 1974-1989, Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan; Selected Americans, Edward Totah Gallery, London, England; Jean-Michel Basquiat/Julian Schnabel, Rooseum, Malm•, Suëcia; 1979-1989 American, Italian, Mexican Art From the Collection of Francesco Pellizzi, Hofstra Museum, Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York, USA; Warhol, Basquiat: Collaborations, Didier Imbert Fine Art, Paris, France.
1988/90
An Ecletic Eye: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Bridge Center for Contemporary Art, El Paso, TX and New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, USA.
1988/89
Collaborations: Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mayor Rowan Gallery, Mayor Gallery, and David Grob Limited, London, England; Figure as Subject: The Revival of Figuration Since 1975, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA.
1988
Works on Paper, Gabrielle Bryers Gallery, New York, USA; Work on Paper, Michael Maloney Gallery, Los Angeles, USA; After Street Art, Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, USA; L'Art Contemporain Ç la Defense: Les annëes 80: vues par cinque galeries, Galerie La Defense Art 4, Paris, France; 1900 to Now: Modern Art from Rhode Island Collections, Museum of Art, Rhode Island Scholl of Design, Providence, USA; Rebop, Paula Allen Gallery, New York, USA.
1987/88
Logos, Anne Plumb Gallery, New York, USA.
1987
Works on Paper, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, USA; Avant-Garde in the Eighties, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, USA; The East Village Force de Frappe Comes to the South Bronx, Fashion Moda, Bronx, NY, USA; 16 A 56: Summer Salon, 56 Bleecker Gallery, New York, USA; The Frederick R. Weisman Collection: An International Survey, San Antonio Art Institute, Texas, USA.
1986/90
Focus on the Image: Selections from the Rivendall Collection, The Art Museum Association of America, San Francisco, USA; Heads, Mokotoff Gallery, New York, USA.
1986/87
Collaborations: Jean-Michel Basquiat & Andy Warhol, Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich, Switzerland; Basquiat-Combas: Paintings, Louis Cane: Sculptures, Librairie Beauborg, Paris, France; Portrait of a Collector: Stephane Janssen, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; 1976-1986: Ten Years of Collecting Contemporary American Art. Selections from the Edward R. Downe, Jr. Collection, Wellesley College Museum, USA.
1986
Zeichen, Symbole, Graffiti in der Aktuellen Kunst, Suermondt-Ludwig Museum und Museumverein Aachen, Germany; Prospekt 86, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany; Collaborations: Jean-Michel Basquiat & Andy Warhol, Akira Ikeda Gallery, Tokio, Japan; Esprit de New York - Paintings and Drawings, Galerie Barbara Farber, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Figure as Subject: The Last Decade. Selections from the Permanent Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art at Equitable Center, New York, USA; 75th American Exhibition, The Art Institute of Chicago, USA; Contemporary Issues III, Holman Hall Art Gallery, Trenton State College, New Jersey, USA.
1985/86
Vom Zeichnen: Aspekte der Zeichnung 1960-1985, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany; Drawings, Knight Gallery, Spirit Square Arts Center, Charlotte, USA.
1985
XIII Biennale de Paris, Grande Halle du Parc de la Villette, Paris, France; The Chi-Chi Show, Massimo Audiello Gallery, New York, USA; 7000 Eichen, Kunsthalle Tubingen and Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany; Das Oberengadin in der Malerei, Segantini Museum, St. Moritz, Switzerland; Collaborations: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, Andy Warhol, Akira Ikeda Gallery, Tokio, Japan; Warhol and Basquiat: Paintings,Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, USA; The Door, Annina Nosei Gallery, New York, USA; Drawing the Line: Painting, Annina Nosei Gallery, New York, USA.
1984/85
Since the Harlen Renaissance: 50 Years of Afro-American Art, Center Gallery of Bucknell University, Lewisberg, USA; Content: A Contemporary Focus, 1975-1984, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, USA; Figuration Libre France/USA, Musëe d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France.
1984
Modern Expressionists: German, Italian and American Painters, Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, USA; Van Der Zee Memorial Show: James Van Der Zee, 1886-1993, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York, USA; Painting and Sculpture Today, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianžpolis, USA; American Neo-Expressionists, The Aldrich Museum of Art, Ridgefield, USA; Drawings by 11 Artists, Willard Gallery, New York, USA; New Art, Musëe d'Art Contemporain, Montreal, Canadž; An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Aspekte Amerikanischer Kunst Der Gegenwart, Neue Galerie-Sammlung Ludwig, Aachen, Germany; The East Village Scene, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA; Content, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA; Painting Now: The Restoration of Painterly Figuration, Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Japan; Arte di Frontiera: N. Y. Grafitti, Galleria Communale d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, Italy; Collaborations: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, Andy Warhol, Gallery Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich, Switzerland; Art, Area, New York, USA.
1983/84
Bact to the USA: Amerikanische Kunst der Siebziger und Achtziger, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland; Written Imagery Unleashed in the Twentieth Century, Fine Arts Museum of Long Island, Hempstead, New York, USA.
1983
Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; Post Graffiti, Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, USA; Intoxication, Monique Knowlton Gallery, New York, USA; Paintings, Mary Boone Gallery, New York, USA; Mary Boone and Her Artists, The Seibu Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan; Food for the Soup Kitchens, Fashion Moda, Bronx, New York, USA; From the Streets, Greenville County Museum of Art, USA; Terminal New York, Brooklyn Navy Yard, New York, USA; Expressive Malerei nach Picasso, Galerie Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland; Champions, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, USA; Group Show, Annina Nosei Gallery, New York, USA.
1982/83
New York Now, Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover, Germany; Group Show, Annina Nosei Gallery, New York, USA.
1982
New New York, University Fine Arts Galleries, School of Visual Arts, Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA; Body Language: Current Issues in Figuration, University Art Gallery, San Diego State University, San Diego, USA; Avanguardia Transavanguardia, Mura Aureliane da Porta Metronia a Porta Latina, Rome, Italy; Transavanguardia: Italia/America, Galleria Civica del Comune di Modena, Italy; New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, USA; Fast, Alexander F. Milliken Gallery, New York, USA; Documenta 7, Kassel, Germany; The Expressionist Image: American Art from Pollock to Today, Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, USA; The Pressure to Paint, Marlborough Gallery, New York, USA; Still Modern After All These Years, The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, USA; Drawings, Blum Helman Gallery, New York, USA; Group Show, Annina Nosei Gallery, New York, USA.
1981/82
Group Show, Annina Nosei Gallery, New York, USA.
1981
New York/New Wave, P.S. 1, Institute for Art and Urban Resources, Long Island City, New York, USA; Lower Manhattan Drawing Show, Mudd Club, New York, USA; Beyond Words: Graffti Based-Rooted-Inspired Works, Mudd Club, New York, USA; Public Address, Annina Nosei Gallery, New York, USA.
1980
Time Square Show, Colab (Collaborative Projects Incorporated) and Fashion Moda (organizers), 41st Street and Seventh Avenue, New York, USA.


Public Collections Osaka City Museum of Modern Art, Japan; Chicago Art Institute, Illinois, USA; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York, USA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover, Germany; Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA.