Jordana Moore Saggese

The first comprehensive collection of the words and works of a movement-defining artist.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) burst onto the art scene in the summer of 1980 as one of approximately one hundred artists exhibiting at the 1980 Times Square Show in New York City. By 1982, at the age of twenty-one, Basquiat had solo exhibitions in galleries in Italy, New York, and Los Angeles. Basquiat's artistic career followed the rapid trajectory of Wall Street, which boomed from 1983 to 1987. In the span of just a few years, this Black boy from Brooklyn had become one of the most famous American artists of the 1980s. The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader is the first comprehensive sourcebook on the artist, closing gaps that have until now limited the sustained study and definitive archiving of his work and its impact.

Eight years after his first exhibition, Basquiat was dead, but his popularity has only grown. Through a combination of interviews with the artist, criticism from the artist's lifetime and immediately after, previously unpublished research by the author, and a selection of the most important critical essays on the artist's work, this collection provides a full picture of the artist's views on art and culture, his working process, and the critical significance of his work both then and now.

Published by the University of California Press (2021).

For the 2017 exhibition, “Basquiat: Boom for Real,” organized by Dieter Buchhart and Eleanor Nairne at the Barbican Centre in London, I contributed an essay to the catalog.

Looking closely at Basquiat’s engagement with television and film culture, I further map the artist’s engagement with the screen (as apparatus), considering its manipulation of the boundary between image and reality, between subject and object.

I recently published a chapter in a volume edited by Ruth Iskin entitled Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World (Routledge, 2017). 

Abstract: 

Few have questioned Jean-Michel Basquiat’s status in the international art market, but scholars have yet to determine the degree to which this has eclipsed his relationship to the critical “canon.” This essay frames Basquiat’s appropriative impulses, his obsession with the signs and symbols of commodification, and his focus on multilingualism, as part of a larger interrogation of the relationship between international market appeal and critical acclaim. Moreover, I argue that this work highlights the specificity and complexity of contemporary modes of recognition and success in a global art history whose parameters are increasingly defined by the art market. 

Catalogue essay published for the exhibition: "Words Are All We Have" at Nahmad Contemporary May 2 - June 18, 2016. 

For the Spring 2016 issue of Art Journal, I edited a collection of essays and a roundtable discussion concerning issues of diversity in higher education. In my introduction, I argue that the complex experience of identity in the contemporary world has yet to produce a truly intersectional scholarship—that is, one that considers the relationships among gender, race, ability, and so forth, as well as how the theoretical frameworks from one particular camp (e.g., queer studies) might be mobilized by scholars outside that field. The very terms that we seek to expand begin to constrain us and even potentially reinforce the marginality of those positions we hope to move to the center of our art making and our scholarship. You can read the full introduction here.

Jefferson Pinder is a Chicago based video/performance artist, who seeks to find black identity through the most dynamic circumstances. His experimental videos and films feature performances that reference music videos and physical theatre. Pinder’s work provides personal and social commentary in accessible and familiar format. Inspired by soundtracks, Pinder utilizes hypnotic popular music and surreal performances to underscore themes dealing with Afro-Futurism, physical endurance and blackness. Pinder currently teaches in the Contemporary Practices department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I interviewed him via email in the summer of 2014. Read the published interview here.

Writing for the general public is a high priority for me. I was excited by the opportunity to write about Basquiat for the new collection of AP Art History Resources on Khan Academy. This was a chance to revise many of celebrity-focused opinions of his work and to communicate his accomplishments as a painter to a new audience. Read the full article here.

Before his death at the age of twenty-seven, Jean-Michel Basquiat completed nearly 2,000 works. These unique compositions—collages of text and gestural painting across a variety of media—quickly made Basquiat one of the most important and widely known artists of the 1980s. Reading Basquiatprovides a new approach to understanding the range and impact of this artist’s practice, as well as its complex relationship to several key artistic and ideological debates of the late twentieth century, including the instability of identity, the role of appropriation, and the boundaries of expressionism. Jordana Moore Saggese argues that Basquiat, once known as “the black Picasso,” probes not only the boundaries of blackness but also the boundaries of American art. Weaving together the artist’s interests in painting, writing, and music, this groundbreaking book expands the parameters of aesthetic discourse to consider the parallels Basquiat found among these disciplines in his exploration of the production of meaning. Most important, Reading Basquiat traces the ways in which Basquiat constructed large parts of his identity—as a black man, as a musician, as a painter, and as a writer—via the manipulation of texts in his own library.

Published by the University of California Press (2014).

I wrote a short piece on the emergence of identity politics as a theoretical and artistic concern in contemporary art for the online educational platform Khan Academy. You can see the full essay here. 

A short essay for the online education platform Khan Academy on the group of artists known as "The Pictures Generation." I introduce the main critical concerns of these artists, as well as their legacy for contemporary art. You can see the full essay here.

In 1992, during the first retrospective of Basquiat's work, Richard Marshall lamented: "Jean-Michel Basquiat first became famous for his art, then he became famous for being famous, then he became famous for being infamous—a succession of reputations that often overshadowed the seriousness and significance of the art he produced." The artist's place is even now much more secure in pop culture than in academe, so the Basquiat retrospective that opened at the Fondation Beyeler in 2010 and subsequently traveled to the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris was not just a museum show to celebrate the artist's fiftieth birthday but also an argument for Basquiat's place in art history. Following precedent, this latest exhibition focused on the artist's larger, midcareer canvases, but this essay reads several of Basquiat's small-scale, early works as marked by often-overlooked inquiries into modernism, epistemology, and the potential of appropriation.

See the full essay here.

Andy Warhol always made himself available and accessible to younger emerging artists, and in the vibrant New York art scene of the 1980s, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francesco Clemente forged particularly close friendships with Warhol--even becoming something of a triumvirate, as this new publication on the three artists shows. Between 1983 and 1985, Basquiat, Clemente and Warhol produced a number of collaborative paintings whose compositional vitality lay in their fusion of contrary energies, and the three constantly borrowed and adapted motifs from each other, also making portraits of one another. Ménage à Trois: Warhol, Basquiat, Clemente offers a comprehensive overview of this generative friendship, which is contextualized through full-color reproductions, documentary photographs, essays and an interview with Bruno Bischofberger, the collector who initiated Warhol and Basquiat's collaborations.

A review of the exhibition "Choose Paint! Choose Abstraction!" at the Museum of the African Diaspora. Published online for the International Review of African American Art in June 2012.

In 1969, Joseph Kosuth proclaimed that “aesthetics…are conceptually irrelevant to art.”  More than 35 years later, discussions of conceptual art still focus on the ideas rather than on the material documentation, placing these ideas within a particular social or political discourse.  Artists and scholars have continued to argue that the photograph, one of the most common objects used by these artists, is almost arbitrary, with no artistic value.  Nancy Foote summarizes this argument in her 1976 essay “The Anti-Photographers,” where she states that conceptual art “strips the photograph of its artistic pretensions, changing it from a mirror to a window. What it reveals becomes important, not what it is.”   Due to the context of its production and exhibition, many continue to read the photography of the conceptual artists as neutral, ignoring any artistic possibilities...."

Download the rest of this essay here.

This catalogue includes works by prominent American artists such as John Cage, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg, but is particularly strong in the area of minimal art, with drawings by Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and Fred Sandback, displaying the wide range of productive and analytic possibilities within this medium.

Edited by Josef Helfenstein and Jonathan Fineberg (Champaign, IL: Krannert Art Museum, in association with University of Washington Press), 39–40, 52–57,122–123, and 136–139.

Krannert Art Museum: Selected Works represents the first published survey of Krannert Art Museum's (KAM's) encyclopedic collection of art since the museum's opening in 1961. The publication highlights over 150 objects from KAM's permanent collection, spanning ancient through contemporary art. Artwork and objects from diverse artistic traditions, media, and geographies are represented in this 358-page, full-color book.