Art by Jean-Michel Basquiat

Basquiat's first public work wasn't in a gallery. It was SAMO©, a spray-painted alter ego he ran across downtown Manhattan in the late 1970s with a friend, Al Diaz, tagging cryptic, half-poetic phrases on walls near art schools and clubs. By the time he was in his early twenties, self-taught and with no formal training, he'd moved from that into a painting practice that packed crowns, skulls, anatomical diagrams, and fragments of text into dense, restless compositions that were often, deliberately, about Black history, racism, and who gets left out of the art-historical canon.

He and Andy Warhol became close collaborators in the mid-1980s, producing a series of paintings together, trading ideas across a 30-year age gap that made some critics dismiss Basquiat as Warhol's protégé rather than a full creative partner. When Warhol died suddenly in 1987, people close to Basquiat said he took it hard, and he was reportedly using heroin heavily in the year that followed.

He died of an overdose in August 1988, at 27. In 2017, his 1982 painting Untitled, a raw, oversized skull, sold for $110.5 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for an American artist's work, to a collector who wasn't even born when Basquiat made it.