Art and Architecture: Jean Michel Basquiat: The Notebooks | Fred “Fab 5 Freddy” Brathwaite, Al Diaz, Michael Holman, Carlo McCormick, Mary Ann Monforton, Larry Warsh | An Art Book Series Event

October 14, 2015

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FREE - Auditorium doors open at 5:30 p.m.

Celebrating the publication of Jean Michel Basquiat: The Notebooks a facsimile edition of eight composition books produced by the artist, and The Unknown Notebooks exhibition featuring them at Brooklyn Museum, Carlo McCormick moderates a panel discussion featuring Basquiat's close friends and collaborators Fred "Fab 5 Freddy" Brathwaite, Al Diaz, Michael Holman, Mary Ann Monforton, and Larry Warsh

 The Notebooks coverFocusing primarily on this previously little-known body of seminal writing and formative ideas forged in the private practice of personal journal/sketchbook by one of the world’s most celebrated artists, Basquiat’s intimate associates (including the co-author of his legendary street art persona SAMO and the co-founder of his urban industrial noise band Gray) share their own insights and observations on the artist as they explore how Basquiat’s notebooks reveal his idiosyncratic voice and visual art strategies.

Brooklyn-born Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) was one of the most important artists of the 1980s. A key figure in the New York art scene, he inventively explored the interplay between words and images throughout his career, first as a member of SAMO, a graffiti group active on the Lower East Side in the late 1970s, and then as a painter acclaimed for his unmistakable Neoexpressionist style. From 1980 to 1987, he filled numerous working notebooks with drawings and handwritten texts. This facsimile edition reproduces the pages of eight of these fascinating and rarely seen notebooks for the first time. He has been the subject of retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Serpentine Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Foundation Beyeler, among others, and his work is in the permanent collections of major museums around the world. 

The Notebooks are filled with images and words that recur in Basquiat’s paintings and other works. Iconic drawings and pictograms of crowns, teepees, and hatch-marked hearts share space with handwritten texts, including notes, observations, and poems that often touch on culture, race, class, and life in New York. Like his other work, the notebooks vividly demonstrate Basquiat’s deep interests in comic, street, and pop art, hip-hop, politics, and the ephemera of urban life. They also provide an intimate look at the working process of one of the most creative forces in contemporary American art.

Copies of the book (Princeton University Press 2015) are available for purchase and signing at the end of event.

Page 25 from Jean-Michel Basquiat Notebooks
Page 25 from Jean-Michel Basquiat Notebooks

Fred “Fab 5 Freddy” Brathwaite is an artist, filmmaker and Hip Hop legend. In the late 1970s, Brathwaite became a member of the graffiti group The Fabulous 5, known for painting the entire side of whole NY subway cars. Immortalized in the Blondie song Rapture, and making a cameo along with Basquiat in the music video, Brathwaite also appeared in Downtown 81, the film that starred Jean-Michel Basquiat, and created the concept for the seminal Hip Hop film Wild Style. Fab 5 Freddy's single Change the Beat with the line "this stuff is really fresh", is one of the most scratched samples in the history of Hip Hop, and in the late 1980s he hosted the groundbreaking and first internationally telecast Hip Hop music video show; Yo! MTV Raps. Over the years Brathwaite’s extensive credits in film, television and music video include producer, director and actor, and he continues to work as a visual artist.

Al Diaz is best known for his collaboration with Jean Michel Basquiat on SAMO©, graffiti that appeared in lower Manhattan from 1977 to 1979. SAMO© initially became known because of its wit and sarcastic humor; but became a globally recognized graffito after Basquiat’s rise to fame. A prolific and influential first-generation NYC subway graffiti artist, who later became a text-oriented street artist, Al Diaz’s career spans 5 decades. He currently works with WET PAINT signs used throughout the New York City subway system. After cutting out individual letters to create clever, surreal and sometimes poignant anagrams, he hangs the finished works in subways stations throughout New York City.

Page 79 from Jean-Michel Basquiat Notebooks
Page 79 from Jean-Michel Basquiat Notebooks

Working with film and video, Michael Holman captured the powerful new subculture of Hip Hop back in the early 1980s. Through his numerous published writings and film/television productions, he helped propel Hip Hop onto the global stage, and was the first writer to officially use the term Hip Hop in a publication. Holman managed two of the most popular Hip Hop dance crews in history, The Rock Steady Crew and The New York City Breakers, and created the first nationally syndicated Hip Hop television show, Graffiti Rock, starring Run DMC and Kool Moe Dee. Holman, along with artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, formed the experimental band Gray, producing layered avant-garde music in combination with performance art and living, sonic sculpture. Holman wrote the screenplay to Miramax’s Julian Schnabel feature film, Basquiat and has taught screenwriting and filmmaking at numerous institutions of higher learning. 

Cultural critic and curator, Carlo McCormick has been writing about art, popular culture and the relationship between them since the early 1980s. McCormick is Senior Editor of Paper Magazine and a frequent contributor to numerous art magazines. He has contributed major texts to well over a hundred art books, monographs and exhibition catalogues and dedicated much of his energies to charting the visual vernaculars of youth culture, including graffiti and street art. McCormick has curated exhibitions at numerous museums in New York City, including the award winning The Downtown Show: The New York Scene 1974-1984 for NYU’s Grey Art Gallery and Fales Library.

Page 147 from Jean-Michel Basquiat Notebooks
Page 147 from Jean-Michel Basquiat Notebooks

Mary-Ann Monforton is the Associate Publisher of BOMB Magazine. Her art engagement has encompassed a wide range of expressions since her arrival in NYC in 1974, armed with a BFA in sculpture. She's been a chorus line dancer for the Copacetics, a funk/jazz music promoter, and a costume designer. In 1981, she came back to my first love, the visual arts, after visiting the Fun Gallery. In 1981 she purchased a Kenny Scharf, three Basquiats, and two Keith Harings igniting a passion for art collecting that continues to this day. Her friendship with Jean Michel Basquiat began around 1979 when she was a music promoter spending a good deal of time in various night clubs and in particular the Mudd Club and continued until about 1984.

Larry Warsh has been active in the art world for more than thirty years. An early collector of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, he has one of the most important collections for both artists with many significant works, including Basquiat’s Notebooks recently exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum. He was a member of the Basquiat Authentication Committee from its establishment in 1984 to its dissolution in 2012. He has been responsible for numerous publishing projects in the last decade, including original monographs for Haring, Basquiat and Ai Weiwei, with whom he has collaborated on several significant projects including the award winning world tour of Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads.

Page 295 from Jean-Michel Basquiat Notebooks
Page 295 from Jean-Michel Basquiat Notebooks

In its seventh year the program series An Art Book, initiated and organized by Arezoo Moseni, is a celebration of the essential importance and beauty of art books. The events showcase book presentations and discussions by world renowned artists, critics, curators, gallerists, historians and writers.

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