Before his death at the age of twenty-seven, Jean-Michel Basquiat
completed nearly 2,000 works. These unique compositions--collages of
text and gestural painting across a variety of media--quickly made
Basquiat one of the most important and widely known artists of the
1980s. Reading Basquiat provides a new approach to understanding the
range and impact of this artist's practice, as well as its complex
relationship to several key artistic and ideological debates of the late
twentieth century, including the instability of identity, the role of
appropriation, and the boundaries of expressionism. Jordana Moore
Saggese argues that Basquiat, once known as "the black Picasso," probes
not only the boundaries of blackness but also the boundaries of American
art. Weaving together the artist's interests in painting, writing, and
music, this groundbreaking book expands the parameters of aesthetic
discourse to consider the parallels Basquiat found among these
disciplines in his exploration of the production of meaning. Most
important, Reading Basquiat traces the ways in which Basquiat
constructed large parts of his identity--as a black man, as a musician,
as a painter, and as a writer--via the manipulation of texts in his own
library.