Jean Michel Basquiat

Students were introduced to the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and made ceramic pieces to cover to lamp posts. Students studied articles, documentaries, music and more to understand Jean Michel Basquiat’s work. Conceptually they were encouraged to focus on elements of Basquiat’s life such as jazz music, list making and SAMO tagging. Technically the students were to take advantage of the clay and the glazes by painting energetically and symbolically and consider building the clay form sculpturally with the energy of Basquiat’s painting.

Jean Michel Basquiat’s work is incredibly relevant today even though it was painted in the 1980s it is about police brutality, black lives matter and SAMO (the same old crap.) SAMO was talked about with his buddies in terms of marijuana and what was going on in New York during that time. He really became a really famous artist quickly in the 1980s talking about what mattered to him.

Students didn’t think their piece was done once they installed their interpretation of Basquiat’s work on the lamp post. They knew the concrete post would have been painted by Basquiat – that area needed to be treated as well. The students came out and painted those two concrete posts and built up layers of paint and symbolism they found in Jean Michel Basquiat’s work.

“I was inspired by Basquiat’s “Undiscovered Genius” and “Dog Leg Study”. It’s an art piece with drawings as well as writing. My first impression of the piece reminded me of my notebook in my first semester at Ohlone when I was a Biology major and I was taking a biology and chemistry class. The notebook I took notes in was similar to Basquiat’s art piece. There were little sketches of atoms, cells, ions and more that had to be color coded and were a study of the subject like Basquiat’s “Dog Leg Study”.

“His Afro-Latino inspired themes resonated the most with me as I am still learning to embrace my own Blackness. My original piece is a Black woman with beautiful exaggerated hair holding one of Basquiat's recurring crowns. Her hair is a large portion of the piece because I personally believe that Black women have the most beautiful and stigmatized hair and I was also representing my own long black curls. I wanted her to look peaceful and represent salvation as she cradles the crown. It represents my belief that in order for men to be strong, they need to accept the love of a strong woman and only then can he be a "king".”