Hi Steemit family!

Today I bring you one of the most acclaimed artists of the 80s whose legacy represents today one of the most relevant struggles in the art world for its content against racism and slavery in North America. The denunciation he made for 10 years was enough to finish his career in a formidable way. I am of course talking about the controversial American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. We're going to learn something about his life and work. Come with me on this journey of discovery.

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To his credit, he has at least 1000 paintings and more or less double the number of drawings. His usual themes were based on the origins of the black race in the United States, but that later would become universal thanks to the connection with other countries that went through a colonial period. The slave trade that English traders exploited from 1570 where they would capture the inhabitants of African lands as if they were animals to be traded in a badly called new world is no secret. The fundamental objective of this trade in people arose from the almost total slaughter of the aborigines who, with dignity, fought to recover their lands where they had ancestrally lived for hundreds of thousands of years.

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Now, why would an artist of African-American origin be interested almost 500 years later in continuing to showcase that history? Subsequently, most countries became independent of their settlers, which is the case of almost all of South America from the Spanish empire and part of North America from the English and French empires. The racist thinking of some elite groups remained intact, however, and even in the 1930s and 1970s there were moments of tension in North America over not allowing young people of African descent to study in the university system, James Howard Meredith becoming the first black student to study at a U.S. university.

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What we barely began to see at the end of the last century is that the issue of racism and how the scars and wounds it has left still remained unhealed and artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat made that a spearhead in their art, touching these issues that continue even today. It is an attempt to show how racist white minorities still are in the United States.

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Some of the codes and messages that we can notice in several works of Basquiat are for example the word soap that refers to bleaching or the word cotton that recalls the slaves working intense days in the plantations of this heading. Thus begins a true artistic revolution touching the interests of the establishment, which controlled corporate areas in charge of advertising and entertainment.

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Influenced by pop art, Basquiat resorted on many occasions to the use of everyday materials such as newspapers, cereal boxes, cans, plastics, to name a few.

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He was considered a street artist by the critics, because at a certain moment of his career he began to make some graffiti, leaving a bit of the subject to continue looking for inspiration in the big problems of the cities. The conceptual graffiti was made under the pseudonym of SAMO, and this was a collective work that he did with his great friend Al Diaz.

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In 1984, he made some collective works with Andy Warhol where they concreted at least 15 bras.

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His work is a reminder of the origins of a race that has maintained the courage to be examples in art – we could find a hundred other musicians, sculptors, painters, scientists, engineers, and athletes who were also role models for an intelligent race which, though enslaved in body, weren’t in mind.