Jean-Michel Basquiat was one of the city’s coolest, most legendary icons, not to mention a Brooklyn native. We know this not just because of our deep art and hip-hop history knowledge, but because Jay-Z and Kanye keep rapping about him. It follows, then, that the works of one of New York’s biggest legends pay a visit only to one of the city’s coolest museums. The Brooklyn Museum has gotten a hold of Basquiat’s rare notebooks, and you can see his 160 pages of sketches, poems, observations, and general scribblings of ideas starting this Friday.
The notebooks include initial renderings of some of his most famous motifs, like crowns, skeleton figures, and grimacing faces and will be on display along with some of the native Brooklynite’s better-known large-scale paintings. On Saturday, the museum’s First Saturday celebration will be Basquiat-themed, featuring live jazz, curator talks, a screening of Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, and poetry readings. This is one of those special moments when you get to be really really cultured and really really cool at the same time, so don’t miss out.