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ART CRUSH | LAKWENA MACIVER 

Lakwena Maciver is a London-based mixed media artist who uses a kaleidoscopic colors to make her mark.  Her work been has exhibited everywhere from street installations to galleries.

Informed by decoration both aesthetically and conceptually, she explores the messages that decoration is used to communicate, its traditional use in worship and myth-making and how this translates into contemporary popular culture.

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 Spotlight: Jean-Michel Basquiat

We start off our Black History Month Spotlight Series with a look at the life of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Jean Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was born and raised in Brooklyn, the son of a Haitian-American father and a Puerto Rican mother. His career as a graffiti artist and musician was fostered in the 1980’s New York Art Scene. Under the pseudonym SAMO he’d leave poetical messages impregnated on city walls… “Plush safe he think’… ‘SAMO as an alternative to the bourgeois”. With his crowning of trademark dreadlocks, Basquiat was a regular downtown fixture – he’d go on to become one of the most important artists of the 20th century.

Jean-Michel is credited with introducing graffiti into the realm of fine art. His paintings are often described as childlike; dealing with human anatomy, dense imagery, and his African-American heritage. The mixture of Afrocentric themes with graffiti, anchored on canvas with his esoteric texts and symbols was unconventional and hard to ignore.

His genius trapped in a burgeoning art movement set on ‘crazed’ did nothing to help slow down the excesses he became a victim of. At the age of twenty-seven he was found dead of a drug overdose in his Great Jones loft…the Radiant Child had left his canvassed works behind screaming at the world, their many faces torturing and riveting, like his legacy. The Whitney Museum of American Art held the first retrospective of his work from October 1992 to February 1993, and in 2016 his large canvas Untitled (1982) broke auction records with a final price of $57.3 million.

“He disrupted the politics of the art world and insisted that if he had to play their games, he would make the rules. His images entered the dreams and museums of the exploiters, and the world would never be the same.” – Keith Haring

Basquiat is sometimes more commonly talked of in the context of celebrity than artistically; his friendships/collaborations with Pop Art icon Andy Warhol are still critiqued in the vortex of pop culture phenomena. But there’s so much more…

--> Head over to HAHAMAG.COM to enjoy our supplemental links to more information on the life of Basquiat.

*image Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1985 Photo: AP

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During the summer months, HAHAMAG likes to break out its alter-ego - HAHAxPARADIGM - and have a little fun. You can still catch great art content on our site & blog, but we hope you'll join us for some outdoor activities too. This August, play hard with us as we and our friends at HAHAxPARADIGM bring you some great interactive programming with loads of visiting artists.

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Our new edition of Things We Love is up and ready for you to shop!!

http://hahamag.com/?p=3229

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Julia Chiang's sweet art installation at the Standard Hotel in New York

Hugs + Kisses, 2009 (Images of this piece courtesy: OHWOW Miami) Ring Pop candy and nails. 144″ long, 93″ high, 2″ deep Candy left to melt over time

All For You is spelled out with Ring Pop candy. The candy is left to melt over time, constantly transforming, slowly disappearing, while leaving a sticky trace and history.

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