Even as Jean-Michel Basquiat's imagery has become commonplace and biographical narratives continue to be produced and reproduced, the artwork's critical substance gets lost. Basquiat critiqued the very system that extracts and manipulates Black genius and the people who profit from it: from the corporate collector who will pay anything to authenticate forgeries to the academic scholars who will ensure that transaction; or the curators who attempt to possess Basquiat as if he is territory to be claimed; to the playwrights and screenwriters reinventing narratives with bold conjecture. What if this level of exploitation is just par for the course for a famous artist? Is it reasonable to object if Basquiat was just as ambitious as the actors above? This Spring 2022 Intra-Disciplinary Seminar lecture plays against the paradox of Basquiat and the mounting stakes of his legacy.

Registration required.  

J. Faith Almiron is a longtime educator, organizer, and writer based in Nyack, New York. Her critical essays have appeared in LA Review of Books, Hyperallergic, LitHub, ArtNews. Her scholarship on Jean-Michel Basquiat has been included in catalogs for the Guggenheim, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, among others. She has taught visual culture and critical race and ethnic studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, Cooper Union, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is also a founding member of the emergent Filipinx Solidarity Collective of Rockland. Follow her pen as machete @jfaithalmiron and https://linktr.ee/jfaithalmiron.

The IDS public lecture series is part of the Robert Lehman Visiting Artist Program at The Cooper Union. We are grateful for major funding from the Robert Lehman Foundation. The IDS public lecture series is also made possible by generous support from the Open Society Foundations.