The first comprehensive collection of the words and works of a movement-defining artist.
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) burst onto the art scene in the summer of 1980 as one of
approximately one hundred artists exhibiting at the 1980 Times Square Show in New York City. By
1982 at the age of twenty-one Basquiat had solo exhibitions in galleries in Italy New York
and Los Angeles. Basquiat's artistic career followed the rapid trajectory of Wall Street which
boomed from 1983 to 1987. In the span of just a few years this Black boy from Brooklyn had
become one of the most famous American artists of the 1980s. The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader is
the first comprehensive sourcebook on the artist closing gaps that have until now limited the
sustained study and definitive archiving of his work and its impact.
