Six crimee basquiat biography

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

October 18, 2020–July 25, 2021

by Marina Wells

The sounds of Billie Holiday, Beastie Boys, and The Clash bumped pleasantly in the background of the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston’s exhibition Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation, curated by Liz Munsell and Greg Tate.

Though the exhibit centered on canonical artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988), the galleries also led visitors through the lives of lesser-known artists from various disciplines in the 1980s. The eight-gallery exhibition offered an atmosphere of collaboration, reflecting the era’s transformative projects of breaking down barriers, between New York’s streets and its white-walled galleries, between groups of people, and between the fine art, design, fashion, and music that they produced.

A Brooklyn-born, Black artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent, Basquiat became a pioneer in bringing