Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now's The Time

I love art galleries, museums, really any showcase of human culture. Being a lover of these spaces I have often wondered what they would feel like with the lights dimmed and the crowds gone and I was fortunate enough to experience just that this past week. The Art Gallery of Ontario currently has an exhibition of Jean Michel Basquiat’s work titled Now’s the Time, it has been incredibly well received and has eerily coincided with many of the social and racial conflict that have seemed omnipresent in the news. Indigo, through their Indigo Tweet and Greet events, organized this amazing opportunity where a small group of nearly twenty of us got a private tour of the exhibit with our own guide.

Jean Michel Basquiat was a prolific artist of the eighties who dominated the art world through his unique, though provoking pieces of work that drew form his own perspectives and his New York graffiti style of art. He produced Over one thousand paintings and thousands more drawings during his short career that was untimely cut short after his death from a heroin overdose in 1988. Jean Michel Basquiat was the son of a Haitian Father and Puerto Rican Mother. He grew up in an upper middle class family, attending gifted schools and from a young age was intelligent with an inquisitive mind for the life around him.

At the young age of 7, Jean Michel was hit by a car and while he was convalescing his mother gave him a copy of Gray’s Anatomy which he studied extensively. Shortly after his parents separated his Mother was institutionalized multiple times for various mental illnesses. Growing up Jean Michel had difficulties with his social identity. As the son of an immigrants with both an African American and Latino identity he spoke Spanish, English and Haitian Creole fluently. He saw the Black Culture of the street in 1970s New York but was raised in an Upper Middle Class world, his father an accountant. Before graduation, Jean Michel left High School and went to the streets of Manhattan, practicing the art of graffiti but with the goal of becoming a famous artist. He soon found an Art Dealer after living a life of selling t-shirts, post cards and sketches on the NY streets, couch surfing and using his charismatic ways with women for a place to sleep.

Jean Michel exploded on the Art scene of the 1980s, he was unlike anything else. He questioned the traditional thought of what made Art, and the topics Art could address in America. Throughout Jean Michel’s career you can see the struggle of the dichotomy he found himself in. He had the identity of an intelligent, potential filled son of immigrants, the identity of being “street” and toeing the line of being an Artist who could be taken seriously but not taking the art itself too serioulsy.

I cannot recommend this exhibition enough, it’s emotionally moving and thought provoking. The question of racial divide in America is filling headlines today, sadly the progress we have made is not enough and the message of Jean Michel Basquiat that “Now is The Time” is as relevant today as it was in the 1980s. Get your tickets here

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