Other featured recent work will include prints from Muniz’s “Colonies” series, for which the
artist collaborated with MIT scientists to employ microorganisms, including bacteria and even
cancer cells, to multiply in choreographed designs. In these photographs, Muniz morphs the
frightening into the beautiful, producing striking, intricate patterns from materials with largely
negative connotations. The “Colonies” photographs also follow Muniz’s affinity for bringing
attention to social issues though his work—in this case, the importance of medical research and
vaccination.
New photographs on view will include examples from Muniz’s “Sand Castles” series, for which
he built the world’s smallest sandcastles using a scanning electron microscope to etch micro-
drawings of castles on individual grains of sand. These photographs demonstrate Muniz’s
continued interest in experimentations with scale—rather than featuring massive constructions
photographed from a heightened vantage point, these sandcastle “drawings” are less than half a
millimeter in length. The photographs also return to the artist’s oft-examined theme of well-
known subjects viewed in unexpected ways.
The exhibition also features rarely seen notebooks created by Basquiat, who died tragically young at
the age of 27. Filled with the artist’s handwritten texts and sketches, the 160 unbound notebook
pages will be presented along with 30 related paintings, drawings and mixed-media works drawn
from private collections and the artist’s estate. Also on view will be the 1984 Basquiat painting
“Untitled (Cadmium)” from the High’s permanent collection.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1960, Basquiat had a prolific career, producing some 600 paintings,
1,500 drawings and a small group of sculptures and mixed-media work before his untimely
death. His life and meteoric rise to fame have become legendary, both within the art world and in
popular culture—mythologized in films and referenced by hip-hop and rap artists. The child of a
Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat was fluent in French, Spanish and English. A
self-taught artist, Basquiat first came to public attention in the late 1970s for the aphorisms he
spray-painted around lower Manhattan under the pseudonym SAMO. In 1978, Basquiat left
Brooklyn and moved to Manhattan, living on the streets and with friends and selling handmade
postcards. Basquiat exhibited his art publicly for the first time in 1980 at the Times Square
Show, and his career as a studio artist and international celebrity followed a rapid trajectory from
that point onward.
“This exhibition offers a very intimate look at the life of an incredibly influential, and somewhat
romanticized, figure in contemporary art,” said Michael Rooks, Wieland Family curator of
modern and contemporary art at the High. “It’s evident from his writings that Basquiat knew he
would find the fame that so fascinated and troubled him, and he recognized that his work spoke
to the youth culture of a rapidly changing world. The notebooks give us an opportunity to trace
his private thoughts and reflections from their pages to the walls of the gallery. From them, we
may develop new perspectives on his artistic practice and a deeper understanding of his life.”
Basquiat’s notebooks, created between 1980 and 1987, demonstrate how he began to develop the
artistic strategies that would inform his large-scale works, which combine text and images in a
raw expressionist style to explore culture and society through historical and popular themes. His
unique visual language aimed to undermine social hierarchies and rules, taking inspiration from
comics, children’s drawings, advertising and Pop art, from Aztec, African, Caribbean, Greek and
Roman culture and from everyday life.
