Basquiat first achieved notoriety in the late s as part of the graffiti duo SAMO , alongside Al Diaz , writing enigmatic epigrams all over Manhattan , particularly in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side where rap , punk , and street art coalesced into early hip-hop culture. By the early s, his paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. At 21, Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever take part in Documenta in Kassel , Germany.
At 22, he became one of the youngest to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial in New York. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his artwork in Basquiat's art focused on dichotomies such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience.
He appropriated poetry, drawing, and painting, and married text and image, abstraction , figuration , and historical information mixed with contemporary critique. He used social commentary in his paintings as a tool for introspection and for identifying with his experiences in the black community, as well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism. Since his death at the age of 27 in , Basquiat's work has steadily increased in value.
Matilde instilled a love for art in her young son by taking him to local art museums and enrolling him as a junior member of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In , at the age of seven, Basquiat was hit by a car while playing in the street. Basquiat's family resided in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Boerum Hill and then in , moved to Miramar, Puerto Rico.
Murrow High School. In the 10th grade , he enrolled at City-As-School , an alternative high school in Manhattan, home to many artistic students who found conventional schooling difficult. SAMO for "same old" marked the witty sayings of a precocious and worldly teenage mind that, even at that early juncture, saw the world in shades of gray, fearlessly juxtaposing corporate commodity structures with the social milieu he wished to enter: the predominantly white art world.
