Jean Michel Basquiat Dichotomy

Known for his neo- expressionist and gestural paintings,Jean–Michel Basquiat was a famous ‘black urban’ artist who came to the forefront of the art world in the 80s, his art reflecting the graffiti culture of the United States. In a letter written to Basquiat after his death, Bennett writes: Through Bennett’s admiration for Basquiat is the need to re- contextualise the issues that he has explored throughout his career as an artist. Gordon Bennett approaches such issues within a global context within one of the works from the series Notes to Basquiat (Jackson Pollock and his other)

At 11, Wiley’s mother enrolled him and his twin in a small art conservatory program at Cal State, and in the summer of 1989, he was sent to Russia for training in classical painting. After excelling in this program, he went on to earn his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA for the Yale University School of Art. Although Wiley achieved things beyond his neighborhood, he did not forget the black struggle he was familiar with growing up.

When Jean-Michel Basquiat was invigorating the oppressed art movement of street art, Madonna was an upcoming singer. After a couple of years, and while he was creating amongst, with and for the LA and New York’s art elite, Madonna was still an unknown but aspiring entertainer and they were together.

David Hammons, a renowned visual artist known for his thought-provoking works and has created the powerful piece "Injustice Case" in the 1970’s, 160.02 x 102.87cm. This body print of Bobby Seale, a co-founder of the Black Panther Party, serves as a reminder of the racial injustices and inequalities that persist in society. This will explore the historical and social context surrounding the creation of “Injustice Case”, its significance in the art world, and how it continues to be relevant in today's society. “Injustice Case”, features a drained body sitting bound to a chair and an American flag cut to fit in the border (Artist a Day: David Hammons). The drained body represents the countless Black lives lost at the hands of law enforcement officers, while the American

So within the context of the movie Basquait the story emerges of a Haitian-American kid, who has 'seen the streets' and lived on the hard side of the tracks. Carrying his copy of 'Greys Anatomy' he dissects the streets, dissects and illustrates what he finds beneath and this dissects society and his own fractured place in it. His art even looks a bit like the anatomical drawings of Greys Anatomy and it is this ferocious dissection that formed the basis of a lot of his work. Although Mayer said “Basquiat speaks articulately while dodging the full impact of clarity like a matador. We can read his pictures without strenuous effort—the words, the images, the colors and the construction—but we cannot quite fathom the point they belabor” it is maybe through the lens of thinking about his background as a child who had a challenging childhood that we can figure out what was going on (2205 50). His painting of an African-American policeman with its huge size and broken body may give a further clue with the cultural / race identity confusion of his childhood in the 1960's and 1970's very evident. It is these pressures combined with the pressures of the corporate money-focused art-as-currency/investment discourse that must surely impact on an artist such as Basquiat: painting from within the establishment and making money from it a mechanism that can only

the roles of those two important races in America of the time. The painting is related to the time of slavery (1619-1865) and the unequal positions between the Negros and whites. Finally, I have observed that the unknown painter detailed the whites’ men face very well, yet the black men and woman’s face appears faceless or without identification. This is a representation of the European view towards Negros as a uniform object or animal.

The lives of Baldwin and Delaney illustrate how the focus on light in their art practices aided them in moving forward from an oppressive legacy of racial discrimination to a place of heightened consciousness. Both became less socially and politically vulnerable when they moved to Europe, an environment that accepted them as artists. Yet, Delaney suffered from a psychological condition linked in part to the detrimental

Family Doesn't Define Identity is what defines someone. There are many aspects of an identity that create it’s many sides. As said by Mary Pipher “ I think history is inextricably linked to identity. If you don’t know your history, if you don’t know your family, who are you?”. That being said, how can irrelevant people have an impact on such a personal article?

I fell in love with methodologies of art history. I felt empowered in that, through my own interpretations, I could attach words and meaning to objects. My study of art history reached a turning point when, in 2012, I took a class entitled Identity in a Post-Identity Art World: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Trans/Nationality, 1990 to the Present. The course endowed me with another lens with which to examine works and, more importantly, shed light on representations of marginalized identities. As a result, I was introduced to the writings of Judith Butler and Simone de Beauvoir, both seminal theorists who inspired my own analyses. I enjoyed every minute of conducting research and forming arguments to support my claims. Ultimately I was interested in developing my understanding of issues in contemporary art further and sought to accomplish this by engaging with a larger

Within the painting there is a landscape of tall sculptures that seem to simultaneously resemble buildings as well as stones so a depiction of modern civilization and previous life is being portrayed. Within the picture there is also african americans who stand elevated alongside the towering buildings with instruments in their hands and bright colors to give their vibe. White ghostly hands reach for the hard working Black figure who is trying to reach for the high altitude where the man who is playing the music has reached. Just this one painting reflected the life of an African American within this time period. It reached a large portion of the nation's hearts and created in influence with other

"...Our problem is to conceive, develop, establish an art era. Not white art painting black...let 's bare our arms and plunge them deep through laughter, through pain, through sorrow, through hope, through disappointment, into the very depths of the souls of our people and drag forth material crude, rough, neglected. Then let 's sing it, dance it, write it, paint it. Let 's do the impossible. Let 's create something transcendentally material, mystically objective. Earthy. Spiritually earthy. Dynamic." - Aaron Douglas.During the time of the harlem renaissance Aaron Douglas used his artwork to take pride in his african american culture. All of his artwork conveyed one common message and that was the role that African Americans played in society. All of this was seen in one of his major artworks which was the “Aspects of Negro Life,” mural on the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library.

Moreover, other pieces show the lives and struggles black people have endured since their freedom in the 1960s. Stevens, Ellis, and various students’ art depict the reality of black history in a time when much of black history has been forgotten or altered . The pieces show

To this day there are still many unresolved issues of racial stereotypes and racial inequality throughout the United States. And it is undeniably seen that the world today embraces multi-cultural and sexual orientation, yet there is still an unsupportable intolerance towards ethnicities and difference. The biggest issue in the world today is the struggle for African Americans to end racial stereotypes that they have inherited from their past, and to bridge the gap between acceptance and social justice. One of the most effective ways that blacks have found to bridge this gap, was to create a new way for society to see the struggles on an entire race; this way was created through art. African American artists from around the world are utilizing their skills to bring awareness to racial stereotypes and social justice. When I became and artist, I was afraid that I would not be accepted in the art world because of my race, but it was from the creation beauty and truth in African American art that I was able to see that I could succeed. When I saw this art my immediate feeling was that I was that I was proud of my race. I knew that I wanted to be an artist and I knew that I had a chance to do something great and to make those around me proud. It was because of contemporary African American artists art that I realized what beauty and truth could do to a person’s perspective. Looking back on this, I’m reminded that the most important thing about beauty and truth is

The Black Arts movement refers to a period of “furious flowering” of African American creativity beginning in the mid-1960’s and continuing through much of the 1970’s (Perceptions of Black). Linked both chronologically and ideologically with the Black Power Movement, The BAM recognized the idea of two cultural Americas: one black and one white. The BAM pressed for the creation of a distinctive Black Aesthetic in which black artists created for black audiences. The movement saw artistic production as the key to revising Black American’s perceptions of themselves, thus the Black Aesthetic was believed to be an integral component of the economic, political, and cultural empowerment of the Black

Jean-Michel Basquiat emerged from the punk scene in New York as a street-smart graffiti artist. He successfully crossed over his downtown origins to the international art gallery circuit. Basquiat’s work is one of the few examples of how an early 1980’s American graffiti-based could become a fully recognized artist. Despite his work’s unstudied appearance, Basquiat very skillfully and purposefully brought together in his art a host of disparate traditions, practices and styles to create a unique kind of visual collage. His work is an example of how American artists of the 1980’s could reintroduce the human figure in their work after the wide success of minimalism and conceptualism.