Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat by Javaka Steptoe (review)

Born in 1960 to a Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother, Jean-Michel Basquiat absorbed the color, noise, and drama of New York’s streets from an early age, as well as the cultural amenities of the theaters and museums to which his stylish mother introduced him. Before he left grade school he was on his way to an art career, and by seventeen he left home to make his mark, telling his father, “I will be very, very famous one day.” Regardless of whether prescience or raw determination made those words come true, Basquiat’s graffiti inspired the SAMO© street art project that caught the attention of movers and shakers in the avant-garde art world, launching him into group and solo exhibitions, into friendships with the likes of Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, and—unfortunately—speeding him on toward his death at age twenty-seven from a drug overdose. Steptoe softens the troubling aspects of Basquiat’s life, including his family’s dissolution and his addiction, and focuses instead on the more beneficent influence of cultural nurturing and encouragement and on the very fortunate concurrence of Basquiat’s image-rich compositions on diverse mediums with an art scene poised to explore a new, authentic aesthetic direction for contemporary art. Steptoe’s artwork, drawing upon Basquiat’s own style to illuminate critical moments from his younger years, is fully engaging in its own right and is made more accessible for viewers by appended notes on Basquiat’s life and the symbolism and motifs found throughout his work. What is critically absent from this presentation, however, is even a fleeting peek at Basquiat’s own art; even the fine-print bibliography opposite the title page directs readers to books and DVDs but not to any of the accessible websites featuring his work.