Basquiat - GRAY - “I wanna go back“

American artist. Born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 22, 1960. With a Haitian-American father and a Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat’s diverse cultural heritage was one of his many sources of inspiration. A self-taught artist, Basquiat first attracted attention for his graffiti under the name “SAMO“ in New York City. He sold sweatshirts and postcards featuring his artwork on the streets before his painting career took off. He participated in his first group show in 1980 and had his first one-man exhibition in Milan, Italy, the following year. Basquiat collaborated with famed pop artist Andy Warhol in the mid-1980s, which resulted in a show of their work. He became an internationally known artist, receiving critical acclaim for the fusion of words, symbols, stick figures, and animals found in his work. Basquiat died of a drug overdose on August 12, 1988. He was 27. Although his art career was brief, he has been credited with bringing the African-American and Latino experience in the elite art world. Gray is the name of multiple artists: 1) Post punk, experimental art-rock, featuring Jean Michel Basquiat. In downtown New York City, in 1979, painter Jean-Michel Basquiat and performance artist Michael Holman founded their industrial-sound band, Gray. Jean named the band after Gray’s Anatomy, an important reference source for his paintings and the perfect name to capture the haunting, machine-like ambient music the band wrote and performed. Besides Basquiat and Holman, other members of the original group were Nicholas Taylor and Justin Thyme. Vincent Gallo was a member of the band for a short period of time nearer the end of their first incarnation. In the Whitney Museum’s catalogue for Basquiat’s 1991 Retrospective, Robert Farris Thompson, professor of Anthropology at Yale, wrote this about Gray: “They worked the Mudd Club, CBGB’s, and Hurrah’s in New York, where Blondie and the Talking Heads were at that time emerging. They performed, in other words, at the epicenter of New Wave. Here they contended for space and recognition with a style that, in Basquiat’s own words, was ’incomplete, abrasive, and oddly beautiful.’“