Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement.
DNA was an American no wave band formed in 1977 by guitarist Arto Lindsay and keyboardist Robin Crutchfield, and later joined by drummer Ikue Mori and bassist Tim Wright. They were associated with the late 1970s New York no wave scene, and were featured on the 1978 compilation No New York.
Downtown 81 is a 2000 American film that was shot in 1980-1981. The film was directed by Edo Bertoglio and written and produced by Glenn O'Brien and Patrick Montgomery, with post-production in 1999-2000 by Glenn O'Brien and Maripol. It is a rare real-life snapshot of an ultra-hip subculture of post-punk era Manhattan. Starring renowned artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and featuring such East Village artists as James Chance, Amos Poe, Walter Steding, Tav Falco and Elliott Murphy, the film is a bizarre elliptical urban fairy tale. In 1999, Michael Zilkha, founder of ZE Records, became the film's executive producer.
George Lee Quiñones is a Puerto Rican artist and actor. Quiñones rose to prominence by creating massive New York City subway car graffiti that carried his moniker "LEE". His style is rooted in popular culture and often with political messages.
Tamra Davis is an American film, television and music video director.
Colab is the commonly used abbreviation of the New York City artists' group Collaborative Projects, which was formed after a series of open meetings between artists of various disciplines.
Sara Miller Driver is an American independent filmmaker and actress from Westfield, New Jersey. A participant in the independent film scene that flourished in lower Manhattan from the late 1970s through the 1990s, she gained initial recognition as producer of two early films by Jim Jarmusch, Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984). Driver has directed two feature films, Sleepwalk (1986) and When Pigs Fly (1993), as well as a notable short film, You Are Not I (1981), and a documentary, Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2017), on the young artist's pre-fame life in the burgeoning downtown New York arts scene before the city's massive changes through the 1980s. She served on the juries of various film festivals throughout the 2000s.
Michael Thomas Holman is a New York-based artist, writer, filmmaker and musician. He is also an early 1980s downtown scene subculturalist and creator of the Hip Hop music program Graffiti Rock. Holman is a founding member, along with Jean-Michel Basquiat, of the experimental band Gray.
Carlo McCormick is an American culture critic and curator living in New York City. He is the author of numerous books, monographs and catalogues on contemporary art and artists.
SAMO is a graffiti tag originally used on the streets of New York City from 1978 to 1980. The tag, written with a copyright symbol as "SAMO©", and pronounced Same-Oh, is primarily associated with the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, but was originally developed as a collaboration between Basquiat and Al Diaz.
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child is a 2010 documentary film directed by Tamra Davis. It crosscuts excerpts from Davis' on-camera interview with the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and anecdotes from his friends and associates. The film was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in 2010.
jennifer jazz is a New York writer, musician and performance artist closely associated with the eighties East Village art scene. She was the lead singer and drummer for punk group the Guerilla Girls as well as Pleasure, an early electronica, dub and free jazz influenced band that featured Felice Rosser, Danny Hamilton, Richard Cleves, Martin Wheeler, Jemeel Moondoc and Daniel Carter.
Boris Policeband was a no wave noise music performer who used dissonant violin, police radio transmissions, and voice. Boris Pearlman was a classically trained violist from New York City.
Alan W. Moore is an art historian and activist whose work addresses cultural economies and groups and the politics of collectivity. After a stint as an art critic, Moore made video art and installation art from the mid-1970s on and performed in the 1979 Public Arts International/Free Speech series. He has published several books and runs the House Magic information project on self-organized, occupied autonomous social centers. His partial autobiography was published in 2022 in The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest as Art Worker: Doing Time in the New York Artworld. Moore lives in Madrid.
Coleen Fitzgibbon is an American experimental film artist associated with Collaborative Projects, Inc.. She worked under the pseudonym Colen Fitzgibbon between the years 1973–1980. Fitzgibbon currently resides on Ludlow Street in New York City and in Montana.
Hollywood Africans is a painting created by American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1983. The artwork is Basquiat's response to the portrayals of African Americans in the entertainment industry.
A Panel of Experts is a painting created by American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1982.
Dos Cabezas is a painting created by American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1982. The double portrait resulted from Basquiat's first formal meeting with his idol, American pop artist Andy Warhol.
The Times Square Show was an influential collaborative, self-curated, and self-generated art exhibition held by New York artists' group Colab in Times Square in a shuttered massage parlor at 201 W. 41st and 7th Avenue during the entire month of June in 1980. The Times Square Show was largely inspired by the more radical Colab show The Real Estate Show, but unlike it, was open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in what was then a Times Square full of porno theaters, peep shows, and red light establishments. In addition to experimental painting and sculpture, the exhibition incorporated music, fashion, and an ambitious program of performance and video. For many artists the exhibition served as a forum for the exchange of ideas, a testing-ground for social-directed figurative work in progress, and a catalyst for exploring new political-artistic directions.
Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art is a book by journalist Phoebe Hoban, chronicling the life of American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Released in 1998 by Viking, the unauthorized biography was not endorsed by Basquiat's estate, but various people who were close to Basquiat contributed their recollections of him.
