Walking through a museum can be an incredibly intimate experience. With each painting or sculpture you see, you get to know the artist. Who they were, what they wanted, what dreams they had are all put into their artwork. And the experience becomes ten times more intimate in an artist’s showcase. Walking room to room through one artist’s work, seeing their innermost thoughts, seeing how they’ve grown and changed in their life, and connecting with them on a deeply personal level. And now, you’re able to experience this virtually with a well-renowned American artist.

Jean-Michel Basquiat produced more than 1,000 paintings and 2,000 drawings over a short life. Although he died of an overdose at 27 years old, he managed to cement a place for himself in the art world through his neo-expressionist paintings that dealt with themes of genius, race, oppression, and colonialism.

His work continues to have an impact as, just last year, the Brant Foundation Art Study Center created a major solo exhibition for the artist in Manhattan’s East Village. The exhibition combined almost 70 of the artist’s paintings and now a virtual tour of this show is available on the foundation’s website. The show was held in a renovated former Con Edison power substation, just a few blocks away from one of Basquiat’s previous exhibitions at FUN Gallery.

Art collector and owner of Interview Magazine, Peter Brant, had this to say in a 2019 statement, “Basquiat’s complex oeuvre has established him as one of the most important innovators in modern art, even thirty years after his death…Numerous recent retrospectives have spotlighted his radical approach, illuminating his interdisciplinary contributions to music, poetry, performance, and art and cementing him as one of the most forward-thinking artists of his generation, whose complex engagement with social and political questions makes him more relevant than ever.”