Basquiat Cultural Influence

The Black Arts movement refers to a period of “furious flowering” of African American creativity beginning in the mid-1960’s and continuing through much of the 1970’s (Perceptions of Black). Linked both chronologically and ideologically with the Black Power Movement, The BAM recognized the idea of two cultural Americas: one black and one white. The BAM pressed for the creation of a distinctive Black Aesthetic in which black artists created for black audiences. The movement saw artistic production as the key to revising Black American’s perceptions of themselves, thus the Black Aesthetic was believed to be an integral component of the economic, political, and cultural empowerment of the Black

“Basquiat, The Radiant Child” is a documentary about a young artist of the early 2000’s. This young artist left home to begin his journey; he started out as a bum with nothing and became a street artist. Obviously, Basquiat was very driven by his work otherwise he wouldn’t have taken such a big risk. For this reason, many people were inspired by him and loved what he was doing. I however wasn’t a big fan of his. Throughout the documentary his friends and other artist talk about how he would pretty much mooch off of other people; although his friends said it in a nicer way. He even told his girlfriend that he couldn’t work because he didn’t like how people treated him, so she had to pay for their rent on her own. I personally felt like this

The intersection of social movements and Art is one that can be observed throughout the civil right movements of America in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. The sixties in America saw a substantial cultural and social change through activism against the Vietnam war, women’s right and against the segregation of the African - American communities. Art became a prominent method of activism to advocate the civil rights movement. It was a way to express self-identity as well as the struggle that people went through and by means of visual imagery a way to show political ideals and forms of resistance. To examine how a specific movement can have a profound effects on the visual art, this essay will focus on the black art movement of the 1960s and

At 11, Wiley’s mother enrolled him and his twin in a small art conservatory program at Cal State, and in the summer of 1989, he was sent to Russia for training in classical painting. After excelling in this program, he went on to earn his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA for the Yale University School of Art. Although Wiley achieved things beyond his neighborhood, he did not forget the black struggle he was familiar with growing up.

So within the context of the movie Basquait the story emerges of a Haitian-American kid, who has 'seen the streets' and lived on the hard side of the tracks. Carrying his copy of 'Greys Anatomy' he dissects the streets, dissects and illustrates what he finds beneath and this dissects society and his own fractured place in it. His art even looks a bit like the anatomical drawings of Greys Anatomy and it is this ferocious dissection that formed the basis of a lot of his work. Although Mayer said “Basquiat speaks articulately while dodging the full impact of clarity like a matador. We can read his pictures without strenuous effort—the words, the images, the colors and the construction—but we cannot quite fathom the point they belabor” it is maybe through the lens of thinking about his background as a child who had a challenging childhood that we can figure out what was going on (2205 50). His painting of an African-American policeman with its huge size and broken body may give a further clue with the cultural / race identity confusion of his childhood in the 1960's and 1970's very evident. It is these pressures combined with the pressures of the corporate money-focused art-as-currency/investment discourse that must surely impact on an artist such as Basquiat: painting from within the establishment and making money from it a mechanism that can only

Kehinde Wiley’s large-scale, brightly colored, highly patterned portraits of African American subjects are a salute to traditional portraiture as well as a critique of the art historical focus on the privileged male Caucasian. The artist scouts out ordinary black men of ages 18 to 25 from urban settings to copy poses from works by master Western painters like Titian and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The photographs of their poses become Wiley’s references for his enormous, dazzlingly vibrant portraits. The extreme realism of the figure combined with intense color use, decorative patterning, and larger-than-life scale all emphasize the extravagant grandeur of power and male dominance. Wiley has radically shifted the paradigm to make a contemporary statement about the long absence of the black male figure in historical portraiture.

His portraits of today’s men and women in Old Masters, in which he replaces the European Aristocats with African Americans. He states the his signature portraits are drawing attention to his audience about the lack of African Americans from historical and cultural

When Jean-Michel Basquiat was invigorating the oppressed art movement of street art, Madonna was an upcoming singer. After a couple of years, and while he was creating amongst, with and for the LA and New York’s art elite, Madonna was still an unknown but aspiring entertainer and they were together.

To this day there are still many unresolved issues of racial stereotypes and racial inequality throughout the United States. And it is undeniably seen that the world today embraces multi-cultural and sexual orientation, yet there is still an unsupportable intolerance towards ethnicities and difference. The biggest issue in the world today is the struggle for African Americans to end racial stereotypes that they have inherited from their past, and to bridge the gap between acceptance and social justice. One of the most effective ways that blacks have found to bridge this gap, was to create a new way for society to see the struggles on an entire race; this way was created through art. African American artists from around the world are utilizing their skills to bring awareness to racial stereotypes and social justice. When I became and artist, I was afraid that I would not be accepted in the art world because of my race, but it was from the creation beauty and truth in African American art that I was able to see that I could succeed. When I saw this art my immediate feeling was that I was that I was proud of my race. I knew that I wanted to be an artist and I knew that I had a chance to do something great and to make those around me proud. It was because of contemporary African American artists art that I realized what beauty and truth could do to a person’s perspective. Looking back on this, I’m reminded that the most important thing about beauty and truth is

Julio Valdez Olsen ICS 5 10/21/14 The Struggle of Art Ever since Africans were brought over from Africa against their will, they have been segregated from the elite class. They have been frowned upon for over two hundred years, even in this point and time in the twenty-first century. Through time they had some ways of expressing themselves to show the world of their culture, heritage, and believes. They expressed themselves by paintings, architecture, graphic arts, and sculptures.

Basmala ‘Plots’ ft. Hasan Atiq, evolves as the revolutionary music he is gifting to the world. He pushes the known boundaries of hip-hop and constructs a bridge traversing the musical evolution of many years within the span of a few minutes, a single track or a passionate collection. That is exactly what this independent recording artist has been doing ever since his emergence in the west-coast underground hip-hop scene in 1998 with an LA produced Record Usephasan- Chemistry Teraqueous (Pomo & Amani Smith).

Jean-Michel Basquiat emerged from the punk scene in New York as a street-smart graffiti artist. He successfully crossed over his downtown origins to the international art gallery circuit. Basquiat’s work is one of the few examples of how an early 1980’s American graffiti-based could become a fully recognized artist. Despite his work’s unstudied appearance, Basquiat very skillfully and purposefully brought together in his art a host of disparate traditions, practices and styles to create a unique kind of visual collage. His work is an example of how American artists of the 1980’s could reintroduce the human figure in their work after the wide success of minimalism and conceptualism.

I like to believe that art was a way for Blacks to express their pain, hopefulness, and love that everything Black wanted and could just outright say was put into art; therefore, art was a happy place even though it expressed pain but in pain there is its own beauty. DuBois (1925:53) stated that even though Black art has both personal and universal aspects, that those two things are “combined with certain groups compulsion.” meaning that there was a Black person that spoke for the group through art. His thoughts would lead to black Aesthetic.

The term ‘hip-hop’ refers to a complex culture compromising of four elements: deejaying, rapping, rhyming, graffiti painting, and b-boying. These elements incorporate hip-hop dance, style, and attitude. “Hip-hop originated in the primarily African American economically depressed South Bronx section of New York City in the late 1970s” (Tate, pg.1). Hip-hop is a culture of fashion, language, music, movement, visual art and expression. The genre of hip-hop comes with a very significant history and evolution with its own heroes, legends, triumphs and downfalls. “Real” hip-hop is often stressed in the 21st century due to what is being passed off as hip hop, and it is often made clear that just because one takes a hip hop class, or listens to hip-hop music, does not mean they conform to the true immersion of hip-hop culture. Therefore, “real” hip-hop encapsulates the true essence of hip-hop culture, untarnished by impurities such as rapacious record labels, and vapid, materialistic subject matter. Due to the background of how and where hip-hop first emerged, the African American culture often feel responsible to protect what is for them, and to protect the culture of hip-hop entirely. Boyd states that even though hip-hop as a culture was created as a social movement, the “commercializaiton” of hip-hop demonstrated in film and media construes it to another form of urbanization and popularity”(Boyd, 79). However, in the two movies being examined in this essay (Save the Last Dance

Art is something that can only be achieved with the manipulation of the imagination. This is successful when using objects, sounds, and words. Richard Wright and Amira Baraka brought the power of art into the limelight. Wright’s perception of art was for it to be used as a means of guidance, one that could uplift the Negro towards bigger and better goals. Baraka’s perspective of art was for it to be used as an active agent, one that could kill and then imprint society permanently. Baraka and Wright both wanted the Negro to see that there was a much brighter future ahead of them. Both wanted art to leave a stain, a stain that could not be easily erased, washed, or bleached. Both believed that Black Art had no need to be silent but instead daring.