I hardly need to introduce Jean-Michel Basquiat. His image has been so sanitized and commercialized, however,  that many people identify him as this solitary icon of tortured creativity and 1980s “downtown cool,” rather than an intensely ambitious, earnest, critical man engaged with the world around him and the politics and artmaking of his time. A telling outgrowth of this is that the main artists he’s usually associated with in the popular imagination—Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, the Neo-Expressionists—are white. But Basquiat was extremely critical of the systemic racism and violence that surrounded him in Reagan’s America, and he used his art to lodge critiques and express his own ambivalence as a black artist succeeding in a white-dominated, money-hungry art world. I think about his Famous Negro Athletes series pretty frequently; in a way, the same thing has happened to him that happens to America’s favorite black athletes, from Serena Williams and Lebron James to the latest rash of Olympians capturing the media’s attention: Simone Biles, Simone Manuel, Usain Bolt, and countless others. White America is so desperately unable to talk about race that we sanitize black athletes of their racial identities, the systemic inequalities they have overcome, the real symbolism of their successes, in an effort to promote a faux national unity that can stand in for racial equity (“sports are the great equalizer”…“all athletes matter”). In this absolutely incredible, darkly hilarious drawing, Basquiat’s athletes are reduced to mere masks or unidentifiable stereotypes—a perfect visualization of our culture that will readily co-opt the successes of its marginalized people, as long as they don’t talk about their marginalization.
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