Basquiat & Haring: Art + Music

The Art and Music of Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988)

“Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.”
—Jean-Michel Basquiat

Time Decorated is a new documentary series, produced by the Broad Museum, that examines the impact of music on the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the impact of Basquiat on music. The documentary asserts that Basquiat was the connection between the bebop and hip-hop worlds.

In the 1980s Basquiat became part of the Downtown New York club scene, along with artists and musicians like Keith Haring, Madonna and Debby Harry. In 1983, Basquiat created paintings of his Bebop music heroes like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, the same year that he produced and released a hip-hop single Beat Bop on his own label.

Basquiat’s connection to the Broad Museum in Los Angeles began when the museum’s founders, Eli and Edythe Broad, visited Basquiat’s studio in New York and invited him to visit them in LA.

The three part documentary series Time Decorated is available at the Broad Museum’s website.

The Continued Relevance of Keith Haring (1958-1990)

The public has a right to art. The public is being ignored by most contemporary artists. Art is for everybody.
– Keith Haring

Keith Haring left his hometown of Kutztown, Pennsylvania in 1978 to study painting at the School of Visual Arts. He worked as a busboy and a janitor, doing whatever it took to keep creating the works that he wanted to be seen.

His subway drawings got him the public attention he garnered and he signed with his first gallery in 1982. In 1983 he had his first show in Europe. Sweet and sincere, Haring’s social activism was easy for the public to embrace. His  murals, like the one he did, gratis, at Grace House, a center for at-risk youth in New York, are still fresh and relevant.

The mural was taken down, preserved and sold to an anonymous collector for nearly $4 million to help finance the renovations at Grace House in 2019. It is currently on loan to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver.

In his recent book, Lives of the Artists: Keith Haring, author Simon Doonan looks at the extraordinary career of the artist who died in 1990 at age 31, and whose legacy still resonates and endures.

The works of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring at VFA

Please contact us if you would like more information about the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, available at VFA.