HBentley (Basquiat and the hip hop generation)

  Haley Bentley  

At the beginning of the 1980’s artists associated with street art restyled the contemporary art world. Like A-One, Basquiat, ERO, Fab 5 Freddy, Futura, Keith Haring, Kool Koor, LA2, Lady Pink, Lee Quinones, Rammellzee, and Toxic all continued to dabble words into their artworks, especially when they had their platform in the cityscape. These artists' works formed abstraction and were restricting devices to show repression on their terms. Their subversive practices often ignored disciplinary lines, made with unbound expressions, sampling, and shapeshifting. To show Basquiat’s friendship with A-One, he created a crown for him, the symbol of a master graffiti artist.

Jean- Michel Basquiat Hollywood Africans, 1983 Acrylic and oil stick on canvas. 

Basquiat created relationships with his peers associated with street art. In the 1980s, a new generation of New Yorkers set off on a particular task for American cultural history. Art and writing conditioning with graffiti transitioned from city walls to subway trains, eventually leading to canvases in art galleries. The young artists began to freely sample from their urban experiences and their black, Latinx, and immigrant histories to influence the predominant white downtown art scene with expressionist, pop, and graffiti-inspired compositions. Shortly after this, they started to migrate from the outer boroughs and uptown to downtown Manhattan, and soon after. Went international. Basquiat and several of his other artists who had been writing and painting in public spaces shifted their focus from doing street art to doing their art in a studio and the art market. After this, there was a big spark In the art world, leading to a significant phenomenon in which the artists of their generation were known for illegally writing in the streets but sooner became more widely known and accepted mainstream. Their work began to be featured in films, music videos, and even on television and other various places, but most of all, they became widely prominent in art galleries. While Basquiat's use of spray paint didn’t conform to many of the graffiti culture's strict rules, he soon became a well-known artist for post-graffiti and its movement that first wept New York and then the world internationally as a prominent figure in post-graffiti.

 Henry Chalfant Campbell's soup, by Fab 5 Freddy 1980.

Basquiat and his peers began to be featured in visual artist associations with punk and new wave, following an era where minimalism and conceptual art had dominated artists, discouraging them. Artists associated with graffiti converged downtown, embracing underground and castaway talents from all ways of life. Young graffiti writers became multimedia visual artists, experimental musicians, street-fashion provocateurs, actors, models, and even performers. These artists grounded themselves in street and pop culture, like pop art and expressionism, and drew from their experience in New York City, which helped by influencing their mindset when creating graffiti works of art. 

Source

Basquiat, J.-M., Munsell, L., Tate, G., Almiron, J. F., DeVos, D., Hsu, H., & McCormick, C. (2020). Writing the future: Basquiat and the hip-hop generation. MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts.