Jean Michel Basquiat Analysis

In the short story “Coyote and the Enemy Alien” by Thomas King, there is a common theme of othering that is demonstarted in the story. Othering is defined as to “view or treat (a person or group of people) as intrinsically different from and alien to oneself” (idk how to cite this). The idea of othering is expressed through the Coyote’s words and actions. Othering has been a significant part of the Canadian society with the inauguration of the Indian Act and unethical treatment of the Indigenous people of Canada due to the introduction of the new legislation.

Julie Mehretu’s paintings are loosely termed history paintings by Douglas Fogle and called psychogeographies by the artist herself. A viewer is supposed to find something in themselves much like exploring a city and figuring things out for one’s own self-interest. Mehretu is quoted as saying “my aim is to have a picture that appears one way from a distance-almost like a cosmology, city, or universe from afar- but then when you approach the work, the overall image shatters into numerous other pictures, stories, and events. Historically drawing is seen as inferior to painting which makes it interesting that Julie Mehretu would employ so much drawing into her canvases because drawing is important to architectural drawings. How does the mapping nature of Julie Mehretu’s paintings convey a sense of identity in a very political nature and how is it a representation of the post colonialist world in which we inhabit? Scholars all seem to agree that Mehretu’s canvases are maps, but what do they seek to accomplish? My analysis of Mehretu’s Stadia III will use a biographical and post colonialist methodology to explore the ways in which Mehretu’s own upbringing and how the very nature of her map making, though very artificial, can be seen as a way of both bringing us together and giving those groups that have previously been neglected throughout history a voice.

“Street art is omnipresent in urban streets and is a rish source of inspiration for artistic creativity. . . It possesses the aesthetic voices of the ordinary and enables resistance for the marginalized. Banksy’s street art, in particular, can guide students to think about various social and political issues and to reflect upon the immediate, if not unjust, world in which they live, to transform that world, and to

“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

Othering, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary is, “the perception or representation of a person or a group of people as fundamentally alien from another, frequently more powerful, group.” (“Home: Oxford English Dictionary,” 2017). Therefore, in my opinion, the practice of Othering in this article is the exclusion of persons who do not fit the norm of the social group [African descent].

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

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

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.

Othering is the social outcasting of those who are different then the masses. This is the justification behind such events as the holocaust, segregation and assimilation. Today many books illustrate this. The book The Things They Carried,Tim O’Brian portrayed a character named Mary in the Sweetheart Song of Tra Bong. In Muas authored by Art Spiegelman the jews are othered in the most horrific way. Cristina Henriquez in her novel The Book of Unknown Americans she depicts the character Maribel is other because of her mental disability.

I fell in love with methodologies of art history. I felt empowered in that, through my own interpretations, I could attach words and meaning to objects. My study of art history reached a turning point when, in 2012, I took a class entitled Identity in a Post-Identity Art World: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Trans/Nationality, 1990 to the Present. The course endowed me with another lens with which to examine works and, more importantly, shed light on representations of marginalized identities. As a result, I was introduced to the writings of Judith Butler and Simone de Beauvoir, both seminal theorists who inspired my own analyses. I enjoyed every minute of conducting research and forming arguments to support my claims. Ultimately I was interested in developing my understanding of issues in contemporary art further and sought to accomplish this by engaging with a larger

These questions are posed by what Young calls the “refugee art” of Kara Walker. As displaced subjects, the characters in Walker’s art take on a renewed sense of empowerment even while falling victim to and participating in acts of violence and humiliation. This paper seeks to explore issues of spectatorship and agency in the artwork of Kara Walker, taking into special consideration the critical essays of Kevin Young in the catalogue My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (2007) and Dust Jackets for the Niggerati (2013) alongside a full-length study of the artist by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw titled Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (2004). Both authors discuss the revisionary history of Walker’s visual narratives, yet formulate conclusions from two very different frames of reference. While Young examines Walker’s art from various cultural and historical perspectives, Shaw’s reading takes into account the personal experiences that influence Walker’s work.

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.

In short, from Basquiat's work, I would say the man is brilliant, but the movie's interpretation I would think otherwise. In the beginning of the movie, young Basquiat was presented with a crown on his head to symbolize the greatness he had in store. Through out the movie, he mad amazing art, but the character portrayed was not what I saw on his canvases. The film's interpretation made him seem like a child (which is fairly represented in his work). Basquiat in the film made many dumb decisions such as using drugs, being unfaithful to his girlfriend, and loosing out on a friend because of an article in a tabloid. And this version of him makes me question, does he really create art? Or just scribbles of an intoxicated "man-child" And I come

Othering is the process of forming a person, an object or a group into the role of the ‘other’ and creating individual’s identity through opposition. But as someone is “other” to me, I carry the same label for someone else who identifies with a different group. How do we bring meaning into a term that refers to absolutely everyone? In the films that we have watched, the term is usually defined in terms of the distinction from dominant group. In various films, we see several different kinds of others – ethnic, racial or sexual. While some films deal with others and the process of othering in full exposure, other films and diegetic nationalities treat this sensitive subjects under the covers, therefore society is silent about things that alter from the normative.

“Ten years ago [Basquiat] might have been perceived as a misfit. Today, he is the most collected artist of sportsmen, actors, musicians and entrepreneurs. This statement, with its defensive undercurrent, attests to a gulf between what the market now makes of Basquiat and how art critics and historians have, at least until relatively recently, rated him” (Ratnam). Jean-Michel Basquiat’s artwork had always in a sense been discriminated against. It is well known that his work had not been, at first, taken seriously. Often belittling his artistic skills, many art critics would refer to his work as “street art” and not accredit him of his artistic prowess those who admired him knew he