Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist who lived from 1960 to 1988, born in Brooklyn to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, who began as a graffiti artist under the tag SAMO in the late 1970s before becoming a central figure of the Neo-Expressionist movement in the 1980s New York art scene. His paintings combined text, symbols, anatomical diagrams and figures addressing race, identity, colonialism and class, and he collaborated closely with Andy Warhol from 1983 to 1985. He died of a heroin overdose at twenty-seven, and his paintings have since sold for some of the highest prices ever paid for an American artist.