Jean-Michel Basquiat - G08: Visual Art - Icons and Idols - WAB Learns at Western Academy of Beijing

Basquiat and Hip Hop artists

Create a Basquiat Style Self-portrait
In this lesson, students will create a mixed media self-portrait collage based on the work of American artist and cultural icon, Jean Michel Basquiat.

Jean Michele Basquiat - Britannica
(1960–88). American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat was known for his raw gestural style of painting. He incorporated graffiti-like images and scrawled text in his works.

Gagosian - Jean Michele Basquiat
Born to a Haitian father and a Puerto-Rican mother, Basquiat left his family home in Brooklyn, New York at the age of fifteen and took to the streets. A voracious autodidact, he quickly became a denizen of the explosive and decadent New York underground scene—a noise musician who loved jazz, and a street poet who scrawled his sophisticated aphorisms in Magic Marker across the walls of downtown Manhattan, copyrighting them under the name SAMO.

Radiant Child by Javaka Steptoe
ISBN: 9780316213882
Publication Date: 2016
Somewhere in Brooklyn, a little boy dreams of being a famous artist, not knowing that one day he would make himself a king. Jean-Michel Basquiat and his unique, collage-style paintings rocketed to fame in the 1980s as a cultural phenomenon unlike anything the art world had ever seen. However, before that, he was a little boy who saw art everywhere: in poetry books and museums, in games, in the words that we speak and in the pulsing energy of New York City. Now, award-winning illustrator Javaka Steptoe's vivid text and bold artwork echoing Basquiat's own style introduces young readers to the powerful message that art doesn't always have to be neat or clean - and definitely not inside the lines - to be beautiful.