"What a treasured compilation of essays, interviews, and thoughts about one of the most important artists of the late twentieth century! Jordana Moore Saggese, an accomplished Basquiat scholar in her own right, has selected a broad spectrum of key writings that, in their entirety, capture a comprehensive art history which will be of lasting value to artists, scholars, and admirers of Jean-Michel Basquiat's exuberant, redolent, exegetic paintings."—Richard J. Powell, author of Going There: Black Visual Satire

"This indispensable volume offers a set of vital documents critical for the analysis of the work and career of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was mythologized early on and barely understood even after he passed. This extraordinary, riveting scholarly reader is a significant contribution to the fields of contemporary art, American art, and the discipline of art history at large."—Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture and African and African American Studies, Harvard University

"An artist with a rare and acute understanding of the power of language, Basquiat withheld his words, sous rature, disassembling them, scattershot and specific, to allow hidden meanings and associations. Saggese does a splendid job gathering them here through his interviews and notebooks along with the insights of contemporaneous critics and the recollections of his contemporaries. A vital compendium for future scholarship."—Carlo McCormick, critic and curator

"An invaluable survey of critical writing on the praxis of art phenomenon Jean-Michel Basquiat, including his own textual obsessions––which presents a varied yet precise chronology of his short but art history–changing career."—Diego Cortez, curator

The first comprehensive collection of the words and works of a movement-defining artist.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) burst onto the art scene in the summer of 1980 as one of approximately one hundred artists exhibiting at the 1980 Times Square Show in New York City. By 1982, at the age of twenty-one, Basquiat had solo exhibitions in galleries in Italy, New York, and Los Angeles. Basquiat's artistic career followed the rapid trajectory of Wall Street, which boomed from 1983 to 1987. In the span of just a few years, this Black boy from Brooklyn had become one of the most famous American artists of the 1980s. The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader 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.

Eight years after his first exhibition, Basquiat was dead, but his popularity has only grown. 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.