Full program of events available HERE
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) burst onto the art scene in the summer of 1980. By 1982, at the age of twenty-one, he had solo exhibitions in galleries in Italy, New York, and Los Angeles, and his career followed the rapid trajectory of a booming Wall Street. In the span of just a few years, this Black body from Brooklyn had become one of the most famous artists of the 1980s. Eight years after his first exhibition, Basquiat was dead, but his popularity has only grown.
The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader (University of California Press, 2021) is the first comprehensive sourcebook on the artist, closing gaps that have until now limited the sustained study and definitive archiving of his work and its impact. Through a combination of interviews with the artist, criticism from the artist’s lifetime and immediately after, previously unpublished research by the author, and a selection of the most important critical essays on the artist’s work, this collection provides a full picture of the artist’s views on art and culture, his working process, and the critical significance of his work both then and now.
In her talk Professor Saggese will discuss this new book — the result of more than two decades of work on this iconic American artist.
Registration is required for this free event via the link below.
Panel Chairs: Jordana Moore Saggese and Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw (University of Pennsylvania)
In the century that has passed since the New York Ashcan School rose to critical acclaim, a narrative shaping these George Bellows, George Luks, Robert Henri, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan as white male artists as painters of raw views of urban life has predominated. The story scholars tell about these artists today continues to center around their shared interest in “the real,” and their commitment to the celebration of urban humanity.
But how might we interpret these artists obsessions with observing the slums of lower Manhattan in terms of a wider Jim Crow-era cultural preoccupations with denigrating and classifying racial and ethnic types? How can we reconcile their often virulent racist beliefs with their so-called “democratic outlook?” How do we account for their near-exclusive focus on picturing white figures, even in distinctively urban settings where interracial and interethnic contact was a part of daily life?
This session is concerned with the ways in which the history of American modernism has been deeply invested in shoring up ideals of white, heteronormative masculinity —then and now – by examining how these artists’ works have been interpreted to reify rigid constructions of identity and difference in terms of race, gender, and sexuality.
Papers Will Include:
Locating Blackness in John Sloan’s Backyard Scene
Lee Ann Custer, University of Arizona
Willie Gee and Robert Henri’s Black Portraiture
Margarita Karasoulas
Bellows’s Boxers: Race and Manhood in the Gilded Age
Jordana Moore Saggese, University of Maryland, College Park
A Piece of Cake: Race, Caricature, and Performance in George Luks’s 'Cake Walk'
Meaghan Walsh
A lecture drawn from my forthcoming book, Game On: Boxing, Race, and Black Masculinity (Duke).
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Jordana Moore Saggese will discuss her books Reading Basquiat and the Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader with Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw. A recording of the event is available here.
Elizabeth Allen Lecture Series, Northern Illinois University
Television filtered into Jean-Michel Basquiat's paintings and drawings, even into his music, throughout his career. In this brief lecture I will examine Basquiat’s connections to screen and media culture --both via popular culture as well as the art world. I will look to his predecessors (e.g., Pop artists, who were engaged in media culture that emerged immediately before Basquiat). I will also consider Basquiat’s engagement with media —and consumer culture —in terms of his contemporaries, something that is not often done, since the artist tends to fall outside of most histories of art. By positioning the screen as apparatus (rather than simply as a passive surface onto which images are projected), I will also explore the artist’s engagement with celebrity and spectacle, his critique of consumer culture, and his hyper-awareness of the stereotypes circulating via television and film.
Advanced Registration Required:
https://niu-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIqc-GvrjwoEtf5SWnfHaB8xSRSIYLyR6c6
Annual Meeting of the College Art Association
“Every historian of the multitude the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaves is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor.”
In her 2019 book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman sets out to recreate the history and landscape of black social life, working outside the confined boundaries of the archive and within the powers of the creative imagination. Working from Hartman’s model, and inspired by the generative work emerging from the 2019 “Black Portraiture(s) V: Memory and the Archive Past. Present. Future.” Conference, this session further explores the challenges and the potential within writing African American art history in the absence of archives.
Of particular interest is the reclamation of overlooked histories as reparative gestures. Each presentation reveals the historic failures of the discipline to recognize black artists, as well as the deep tensions one must confront working with artists and their estates. We also consider the labor that goes into archive-building projects. Such work does not qualify as original scholarship under the requirements for academic promotions, and institutional commitments to building these archives and collections are often temporary. We ask, therefore, not only what it means to perform this work, but what are its consequences.
Jordana Moore Saggese and Sarah Elizabeth Lewis will speak of their work to create archives (and art histories) for the contemporary artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Carrie Mae Weems, respectively. Appointed as the Curator of African American Manuscripts and Rayna Andrews as Archivist for its African American Collecting Initiative at the Archives of American Art, Erin J. Gilbert offers a firsthand account of the project of bringing the papers and collections of African American artists into the Smithsonian. Leigh Raiford, working on a multi-year project to archive the personal photography of former Black Panther Party Communications Secretary Kathleen Neal Cleaver, reflects on the tensions between labor, organizing, and producing scholarship on Black women’s lives. And Cheryl Finley will discuss her Mapping Art History at the Atlanta University Center project, which combines traditional archival research methods and digital humanities platforms to foreground underrepresented narratives, movements, artists and practices.
Each of the six panelists will present short, 8-minute papers on their individual projects, which will be available pre-recorded on the CAA website. A live roundtable discussion, moderated by Nicole Fleetwood, will take place on February 12th at 6:00pm.
Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat rose to fame in the 1980's Lower East Side New York arts scene.
Andy Warhol was his friend and collaborator, Madonna a one time girlfriend and David Bowie a huge admirer. But beyond this club scene personality raged a prolific artist, writer and musician. During his short career Basquiat created no less than 1000 drawings, 700 paintings and many sculpture and mixed media works. In 2017 he became one of a handful of artists whose work broke the $100 million mark. His life challenged the boundaries of ‘blackness’ but also the boundaries of American art.
He is championed by actor David Jonsson best known for his work on 'Deep State' and 'Industry'. He has described Basquiat's life as both an inspiration and a cautionary tale. He is joined by Jordana Moore Saggese, Associate Professor of American Art at the University of Maryland College Park and author of two scholarly books on Jean-Michel Basquiat. These include The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader: Writings, Interviews and Critical Responses.
Artists' Legacy Foundation presents a conversation between 2020 Artist Award recipient Peter Williams and Dr. Jordana Moore Saggese, associate professor of American art at the University of Maryland.“Political Values, Market Values, Art Values: The Ethics of American Art in the 1980s” will gather scholars from across the United States who are actively engaged in writing the first histories of the period. The conference is open to the public and will center around the papers of ten speakers. It will also include a conversation with the artist, Hans Haacke. Papers address: artworks by David Hammons and Tehching Hsieh as provocations to legal and economic systems of value; the economics of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s canonization; the politics of canonicity in the work of Tim Rollins and K.O.S.; connections and competitions between American and Western European art markets; and postmodernist and feminist critiques of representation by Louise Lawler, Jenny Holzer and Cindy Sherman.
Jordana Moore Saggese, associate professor of American art, University of Maryland, College Park, will explore the intersections of aesthetics and athletics in American visual culture—both thematically and formally---at the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Lecture on Thursday, October 17, at 4:10 pm in Cohen Hall 203. Her talk is entitled "On the Ropes: Boxing and Black Sexuality in American Art," with a reception to follow in the Cohen atrium.
I will be part of a special panel discussion on Jean-Michel Basquiat | Xerox, with other distinguished Basquiat experts Diego Cortez and Jeffrey Deitch. The event will be moderated by Dieter Buchhart.
RSVP is required, as space is limited. RSVP@nahmadcontemporary.com
I will be talking about Basquiat's work in relationship to film and television as part of the exhibition "Basquiat: Boom for Real," which is on view at the Barbican Art Gallery from September 21, 2017 through January 28, 2018.
"The Black Athletic Body in Contemporary Art"
In the American context, sport has always been more than a demonstration of athleticism or skill. Many art historians have studied the links between athletics and aesthetics, looking specifically at how discourses of masculinity converged with artistic expression in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet, in most cases, any analysis of masculine identity inspired by these works remains largely white, middle-class, and heterosexual. This lecture shifts the discourse around sports and fine arts to ask how and to what ends issues of race, gender, and sexuality intersect in images of black athletes. Looking closely at the work of several artists from the nineteenth century photographs to the near present,I will demonstrate how the black athlete—particularly for black, male, queer artists—complicates our readings of these bodies. I will show how black contemporary artists specifically exploit the malleability of the image of masculinity to force a consideration of the dynamic nature of blackness itself.
Basquiat painted Defacement after fellow artist Michael Stewart was beaten to death by New York City police in September 1983. Originally painted on the wall of Keith Haring’s studio in the days after Stewart’s death, the painting is now privately owned and seldom displayed in public.
WCMA partnered with writer, activist, and Williams alumna Chaédria LaBouvier ’07 to bring the painting to campus. LaBouvier’s research frames Basquiat’s work within the context of contemporary social issues, such as black masculinity, racism, and police brutality. “This is the most topical painting in Basquiat’s body of work at the moment. When you remove the myth and iconography of Jean-Michel Basquiat and engage directly with this work, you see a 22-year-old struggling with the vulnerability of the black body, the limits of assimilation, and the idea of state violence as an American heritage,” says LaBouvier.
Thirty-three years after Basquiat painted Defacement, the work takes on new critical resonance. At a time when the reality of extrajudicial violence against black Americans is at the forefront of national conversations, Basquiat’s painting is a reminder of the long-standing history and continued reality of such violence.
Defacement will hang above the fireplace mantel as the focal point of WCMA’s historic Reading Room, part of the college’s first library. Installing the work in a domestically scaled space furnished as a living room, rather than in a traditional gallery, invites extended looking and offers a communal space for gathering. “As a campus museum, WCMA is committed to engaging with the critical issues of our time. With this powerful painting as its centerpiece, the reading room becomes a public platform to do just that. Defacement will catalyze a range of conversations about the many ways in which it continues to resonate in our contemporary social and political climate,” said Sonnet Coggins, WCMA’s Associate Director for Academic and Public Engagement.
To launch a series of public conversations hosted by a range of community and student groups and academic course meetings, LaBouvier will moderate a discussion on Thursday, November 10. The program brings together Pérez Art Museum Director Franklin Sirmans and Professor of Visual Studies at the California College of the Arts Jordana Saggese to discuss why this painting matters, what it meant in 1983, and what it means in 2016.
I am presenting a paper "“Between Capital and the Canon: The Case of Jean-Michel Basquiat" on the panel "Making a Killing: Art, Capital, and Value in the Twenty-first Century" chaired by Tom McDonough, State University of New York Binghamton University.
Location: Delaware Suite A, Lobby Level
Join me in New York for a conversation at The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Other panelists include: Dr. David Clinton Wills, Kim Drew, and The Very Black Project.
Program Description:
Guests will present a #veryqueer #verybasquiat #verydiasporic #veryblack conversation on the life and legacy of Jean Michel-Basquiat. This program, created by NYU Africana Studies graduate students, Ja’nell Ajani and Ayanna Legros, explores and historicizes the cultural phenomena and life events that laid the foundation for Basquiat’s creative genius and his undeniable impact on African Diasporic communities across the globe.
This program is presented in collaboration with NYU Africana Studies, Basquiat: Still Fly @55, Welcome To Harlem, and The Black Connection.
PEN CENTER USA will host the 25th Annual Literary Awards Festival in Beverly Hills, where my book Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art will be awarded the UC Press Exceptional First Book Award.
The event will be hosted by Aisha Tyler. Honorees and Literary Award Winners include Francis Ford Coppola, John Kiriakou, ProPublica, Daniel Alarcón, Meghan Daum, McKenzie Funk, Noah Hawley, Victor Lodato,Graham Moore, Ainsley Morse and Peter Golub, Claudia Rankine, Jordana Moore Saggese, Robert Thomas, Leslye Walton, G. Willow Wilson.
Tickets can be purchased online here.
I will be presenting research for my new book (Game On: The Black Male Athlete in American Art and Visual Culture) as part of the International Symposium "Global History of Sport in the Cold War" at New York University. The symposium will be hosted by the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia and co-sponsored by the Cold War Project. My paper is titled: "The Black Athletic Body."
I am a panelist for a day-long symposium in conjunction with an exhibition of Basquiat's work at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
I have organized a panel "Step into the Arena: Visualizing Boxing and Wrestling in American Culture" for the Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association in Los Angeles. The panel includes papers by myself, Teresa Leininger-Miller (University of Cincinnati), Alma López (UCLA), and C. Richard King (Washington State University). Aaron Baker (Arizona State University) will moderate. My paper “The Greatest: Muhammad Ali and Black Sexuality in Contemporary American Art” will present my most recent research on the intersections of athletics and aesthetics in contemporary African American Art. For more information on the conference click here.
I will be talking about my new book Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art at Gagosian Gallery. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
I will be traveling to the University of Texas at Austin in October to give a public lecture on my book Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art. During my time in Austin, I will also be speaking with graduate students enrolled in the Art History program's "Research & Methods" course.
Museum of the African Diaspora andUC Berkeley Art and Design Center present an evening of art, film and discussion on Thursday, May 14th.
The evening begins at 6pm at the Museum of the African Diaspora (685 Mission Street at Third) with a screening of the film Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child. Director Tamra Davis pays homage to her friend in this definitive documentary but also delves into Basquiat as an iconoclast. His dense, bebop-influenced neoexpressionist work emerged while minimalist, conceptual art was the fad; as a successful black artist, he was constantly confronted by racism and misconceptions. Much can be gleaned from insider interviews and archival footage, but it is Basquiat's own words and work that powerfully convey the mystique and allure of both the artist and the man.
Join us after the film screening for discussion of the work and legacy of Jean-Michel Basquiat. A panel of Bay Area artists and scholars -- Jennifer Gonzalez and Lewis Watts, moderated by Jordana Moore Saggese (author of the forthcoming Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art) -- will discuss the artist's impact on American art practice, his relationship to the always shifting discourses of blackness, and his precarious position as an artist whose celebrity has threatened to overshadow any critical attention. Special pre-release copies of Reading Basquiat will be on sale at the event!
This program is presented in conjunction with Third Thursdays in Yerba Buena: Art, Drink & Be Merry
Free Admission: Click here to reserve a seat for the film and panel discussion.
Join KQED and the University of California at Berkeley’s African American Studies department and History of Art Undergraduate Association for a special Black History Month event. Following a viewing of the museum’s collection of works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Layla Ali, Sanford Biggers, Lyle Ashton Harris, Margo Humphrey, Rashid Johnson, Martin Puryear, Elisabeth Sunday and Fred Wilson, selections of the Basquait biopic The Radiant Child will be screened. Post-screening discussion panelists will include Jordana Moore Saggese, author of Reading Basquiat; artist Robbie Conal and professors UC Berkeley’s African American Studies department - See more at: http://alamedacounty10x10.org/events/afternoon-basquiat#sthash.zAumsZqj.dpuf
