ARTIFACT 2 - Photo: Steven Lee. “Jean-Michel Basquiat’s A Panel of Experts, 1982 at the Vancouver Art Gallery”, Flickr, 25 Mar 2016.
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s artwork - acrylic and oil paintstick and paper collage on canvas with exposed wood supports and twine. ( 60 × 60 in, 152.4 × 152.4 cm) As displayed at the 2016 Mashup! Art Exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

One prominent reason for Basquiat’s appeal to the art world lay in the formal choices he made in the construction of his artworks of the 1980s. Specifically, Rodrigues notes early on how “…Basquiat grew into one of the most influential artists of an international movement that began around 1980, marked by a (postmodern) return to figurative painting” (227). Along this discussion of figurative painting, Rodrigues references Richard Marshall, who describes how the art of the early 1980s was a kind of “assimilated abstract expressionism” (228), where “…more personalized and subjective figurative imagery came to the fore, characterized by its psychological and conceptual undertones” (228). In a kind of throwback to his roots as a street writer, Basquiat utilized text alongside his figurative imagery, to create works that were what Rodrigues describes as being both powerfully poetic and visually gifted (227). She also describes his work as “…rough, seemingly untrained and extreme” (227). Rodrigues also explores how Basquiat adopted “…unique, self-reflectively experimental visual practices of signifying” (230) through the use of “…signs, symbols… and text in (his) paintings” (231). In addition, Rodrigues also notes how “…the art world seemed to offer a sympathetic environment for Basquiat’s art brut sensibility” (228), and this was a term I wasn’t familiar with. Brut as a word sounds as though it could relate to the word brutish, as in brutish behaviour. Merriam-Webster describes how a brute can also be a term that describes someone as a beast, one who lacks intelligence, sensitivity, or compassion. And in visiting the Tate website, this definitely fits the ideas that lay at the heart of art brut, as the website describes the term as:

Art brut is a French term that translates as 'raw art', invented by the French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art such as graffiti or naïve art which is made outside the academic tradition of fine art… Jean Dubuffet saw fine art as dominated by academic training, which he referred to as ‘art culturel’ or cultural art. For Dubuffet, art brut − which included graffiti, and the work of the insane, prisoners, children, and primitive artists was the raw expression of a vision or emotions, untramelled by convention.

The Tate website for the term art brut also describes how the term relates to graffiti, naïve, and primitive art. An art where the artist would work at deskilling their approach to the works they created. As a term, art brut definitely seems to fit as a way of describing the formal approach Basquiat leaned on in creating the work the art world would embrace. Many of the marks that Basquiat makes are raw, in a way that’s similar to the Shadowman figures created by Richard Hambleton, as seen in ARTIFACT 3 below. Like Hambleton, Basquait was also able to work with almost any material, as shown by the works he created on traditional supports such as canvas and wood panel; as well as non-traditional, makeshift supports as seen with work by artists such as Anselm Kiefer or Robert Rauschenberg. A PANEL OF EXPERTS, as seen in ARTIFACT 2, highlights canvas stretched onto a wood support in a non-traditional manner, with the corners of the frame sticking out from each corner of the piece. Basquiat’s 1982 piece, ONE MILLION YEN goes further than A PANEL OF EXPERTS, with two pieces of canvas appearing to be tied, scrunched, hung and nailed to its wood framed supports which are of different sizes, the lower horizontal support bar laying on an odd angle; and with the piece being hung by a visible rope that’s also non-traditionally attached to the piece. It’s almost as if the piece was found on the street. Rodrigues describes this mashup as a kind of disequilibrium when she notes how Basquiat “… accumulates visual cues and textual annotations– inducing disequilibrium among the paintings’ elements” (235).

ARTIFACT 3 - Photo: Brian McAward. "Richard Hambleton Shadowman 3." Pixels.com, 20 Jan 2020.

Tied to these formal ideas lies a second reason why Basquiat appealed to the art world of the early 1980s, which revolves around the art world’s desire to, as Rodriques notes, “…appropriate and to colonize American blackness so as to convince itself of its own authority (i.e. validity or legitimacy)” (236). This created a kind of unhealthy co-dependent relationship between Basquiat and the art world, as Basquiat continued to make work that interested him, work that the art world believed it needed to maintain its credibility. Rodrigues also notes how the “…art world seemed to offer a sympathetic environment for Basquiat’s art brut sensibility” (228) that was described above. Rodrigues describes how these ideas were problematic, as well as just plain wrong, and she navigates how this likely created tension for Basquiat, as she points out how:

Basquiat’s singularity in the predominantly white world of high art led to his being dubbed the ‘messiah’ of his race’s art, redeeming the reputation and heritage of his ‘people.’

In many ways this also ties into a third reason as to how Basquiat had appeal, and that is in regards to the content of Basquiat’s work, as well as into the audiences his work appealed to. Rodrigues explores how Basquiat carefully crafted his work to appeal to a broader community, which stands in sharp contrast to the roots of more traditional graffiti writers who made work for themselves and the other writers around them. Like Basquiat, Hambleton too saw his work as existing in a place that was both a part of and separate from the work of graffiti street artists. Both Basquiat and Hambleton were able to create works that stood out and appealed to the art world, as well as works that could exist in a broader public realm on the street where it could be interacted with and discussed by a broader audience. For example, Hambleton’s murder mystery pieces generated discussion by the media, the police, and the general public. To this end, Rodrigues explores how on both a formal, thematic and contextual level:

…Basquiat’s aesthetic makes of his paintings economies of accumulation, building a productive play of contingency concerning the mainstream’s constructions of race, which are commonly simplified and packaged for the audience’s consumption.

2. On p. 232, Rodrigues discusses what she explains as the “machinery” and “deterritorialization” evoked in Basquiat’s “hybrid” art that evokes content centered on African American identity. She then summarizes her discussions once again on p. 241. In your own words, describe what you understand these related ideas to mean and their importance in understanding Basquiat’s works.

When someone says something is a hybrid, they are referencing the idea of how something (in this case, an artwork), is an amalgamation or mixture of different elements that makeup the whole. Rodrigues describes Basquiat’s work as representing a hybrid of ideas and themes related to African American identity. For Rodrigues, this hybridity can revolve around choices regarding style and, imagery; as well as with Basquiat’s own persona as related to his own culture, heritage, and history. Rodrigues also draws a direct line regarding the hybridity regarding his place as a black man within the predominantly white world of contemporary art.

All these amalgamated ideas that flow in and out of Basquiat’s artwork help to form “…the machinery that makes up the distilled, packaged blackness to which we are exposed through the mainstream media” (236). The word machinery often references equipment, gears, or hardware and can also describe administrative processes, as well as organizational behaviour. Beyond the social connotations tied to the idea of machinery, Rodrigues also appears to suggest that the formal and contextual choices Basquiat has made helps to form the machinery which carries the metaphors Basquiat leaves for his audiences to unpack. Specifically, Rodrigues notes how Basquiat “…reveals for us the machinery at work behind the construction of the celebrity black American figure – a commodified Africanist presence, distilled and packaged for consumption by the mainstream masses” (231).

It's in the exploration and unpacking of a work that one stumbles onto the idea of deterritorialization, an idea that Rodrigues attributes to Gillesn Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It’s an idea that touches how a work’s meaning can be changed, altered, and reinterpreted again and again by the society that interacts with it. Specifically, Rodrigues explains how deterritorialization as “…the movement by which something escapes from a given territory” (232). With Basquiat’s work, ideas regarding blackness are distilled first by Basquiat into his work and then as the work travels out into the world, those ideas are no longer under the control of Basquiat, but instead, placed into the arms of his viewers as they become further and further removed from their cultural origins that Basquiat was initially exploring. Today, a work is even more mobile, as photographs and video can present and move an artwork around the globe.

ARTIFACT 4, featuring the painting ZYDECO is one of Basquiat's many paintings that explores African American identity in the music and film industries, serving as an example of Rodrigues's discussion of hybridity, machinery, and deterritorialization.

ARTIFACT 4 - Jean-Michel Basquiat. "Zydeco." Acrylic, Oil and Crayon on Canvas, Triptych - 218.5 x 518cm. 1984.

3. Turn your attention to and study Basquiat’s "Hollywood Africans" and summarize some of the key ideas that stood out to you about Basquiat’s understanding of the term “Hollywood” as discussed and argued in the article.

ARTIFACT 5 - Artwork: Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Hollywood Africans.” 84 1/16 × 84in., acrylic and oilstick on canvas, 1983.

Rodriguez explores Basquiat’s understanding of the term “Hollywood” by looking at the formal, conceptual, and contextual aspects of his painting, HOLLYWOOD AFRICANS. Rodrigues uses the terminology, “Basquiat teaches” several times in her article to emphasize how the machinery Basquiat employs in his work is carefully constructed to convey specific ideas. Ultimately, Rodrigues suggests that Basquiat’s messaging in paintings such as HOLLYWOOD AFRICANS serves to represent the unhealthy power dynamics and co-dependent connections between Black artists, the Hollywood mainstream media, and the consumer masses - all of which feeds a cycle of abuse that continues to this day, 39 years after Basquiat painted HOLLYWOOD AFRICANS.

Firstly, Rodrigues explains how Basquiat uses his painting to illustrate how the Hollywood mainstream media has a long history of appropriating and disseminating “marginalized cultures” to the consumer masses (233). On a relatively micro level for Basquiat, this appropriation results in black artists being “…stripped of any complexity and packaged for consumption by the masses” (234). This idea is built upon as Rodrigues examines HOLLYWOOD AFRICANS, noting how Basquiat argues that the black identity is consistently stripped of its unique and authoritative voice within the media (235); seen as a kind of exotic commodity by the Hollywood mainstream media (239). Essentially, Basquiat seems to be describing how black culture has become a new kind of slave to the white Hollywood elites. But on a macro level for Basquiat, this appropriation and marginalization of blacks ultimately serves to highlight “…the continued problem of racism in the academy, the arts, media and society” (234).

Secondly, Rodrigues notes how Basquiat is concerned that this unhealthy power dynamic between Black artists, the Hollywood mainstream media, and the consumer masses is something that goes relatively unnoticed by the masses. Ultimately, it appears that the masses either aren’t aware of it, or they chose to outright discredit or ignore it altogether.

On a third level, Rodrigues explores how Basquiat also teaches through the formal artistic choices that he has made. For example, Rodrigues notes how HOLLYWOOD AFRICANS features a large and prominent yellow background with a swath of turquoise blue in the lower right-hand corner, perhaps representing the surrounding sunny beaches and open ocean, but also the larger mass appeal of Hollywood along with all of its glitz and glamour, as seen in ARTIFACT 5 above. It’s a sunny promise of a seemingly attainable dream. But this dream is punctuated with swaths of black, “…marring the otherwise optimistic color tone of the painting” (233). Drawing back to the idea of how black artists are stripped of their humanity, Basquiat uses text in the form of very specific word phrases which inform the stereotypical roles in which black actors are subjugated to taking, where “…black celebrity figures are implicitly linked to a repressive, shameful past – (where) they are cast as dim-witted laborers or gangsters” (233). Specifically, as seen in ARTIFACT 5, these word phrases include “HOLLYWOOD AFRICANS,” “HOLLYWOOD AFRICANS FROM THE NINETEEN FORTIES,” “WHAT IS BWANA?,” and “GANGSTERISM.” Specifically Rodrigues notes how this ties to the first point raised above, as “Basquiat shows us how the black actor / rapper / musician / artist is constructed in the mainstream, outlining the means by which s/he is cast in the types of role that s/he is meant to play” (235).

Finally, Basquiat shows a concern for and a reflection on both the past and present aspects of Hollywood in relation to the experience of being black in America (234). The present moment is highlighted formally by the inclusion of three figures which include Basquiat himself (“SELF PORTRAIT AS A HEEL #3") and his two friends that he had travelled to California with. Here, Basquiat appears both self reflective and in shock, as his hand appears to be in both a contemplative, chin scratching position, but also possibly serving to cover his mouth in awe. The past is represented in the stereotypical viewpoints of black actors as being relegated to specific roles which were again, plays on stereotypes.

CREATIVE ACTIVITY: Brainstorming Your Curatorial Project CONTENT (PART ONE)

Over the next two assignments, I will be asking you to start figuring out your direction for the curatorial project. For part one, I am going to ask you to generate ideas using the following instructions. If you like, you can hold off on completing this activity until we meet in class Friday where I will explain the activity in more detail.

Ideally, you can create a great idea for an exhibition by combining 2-3 of these criteria:

1) A THEME; 2) A PARTICULAR SPACE/CITY; 3) A PARTICULAR FORM OF ARTWORK; 4) PARTICULAR STREET ART MOVEMENTS; 5) A RETROSPECTIVE OR ARTIST(S) FOCUS

PART A: CURATORIAL INVENTORY IDEAS BRAINSTORM

For each of the itemized categories please brainstorm THREE potential ideas and provide a short explanatory sentence or two about why you find the category ideas interesting, relevant, timely etc… In your PebblePad, you can creatively present your brainstorming anyway that you like—just be sure to include all of the content I am asking for.

A. EXHIBITION THEMES

1. Depression / Mental Health / Suicide: A show that brings together artists and artworks that explore the prevalence and stigma of mental illnesses such as depression and it’s impact on society.

In my revision of my ABOUT ME page, I referenced my own struggle with depression, and discussed how it has impacted artists and creative individuals, referencing several clips and articles about this, as well as two key quotes by positive psychologist Shawn Achor about the prevalence of depression in society, as shown in the following screen captures, ARTIFACTS 6a and 6b:

Furthermore, in my revised ASSIGNMENT 01 response to question 3, which asked us to reflect on what we found to be the biggest takeaway message or lesson for street artists today in response to Hambleton, I discussed the importance of looking after one’s own mental health, and citing the examples of expressionist artist Edvard Munch, as well as street artist Hash Halper (aka The New York Romantic), both of whom struggled with mental health issues as Hambleton did, as seen in ARTIFACTS 7a and 7b below:

Halper’s struggles led him to take his own life in June 2021. In November 2021, street artist and friend of Shepard Fairey, Lance De Los Reyes (aka Rambo) died of a heroin overdose, a result of De Los Reyes’s own drug addiction. In an November 2021 interview with The Art Newspaper called “Lance De Los Reyes, graffiti artist known as Rambo, had died, aged 44,” Fairey was quoted as saying how the prolific Rambo had:

“…been making his best art ever over the last couple of years, and I was very happy that he seemed to be in a healthy groove. I guess it didn’t last.”

A January 2020 article, titled Amman artist brings mental health talk onto the streets features an interview with Jordanian street artist Yara Hindawi whose work explores the “…similarities across the Middle East (and the rest of the world) when it comes to public discourse on mental health” by exploring her own struggles with mental health as well as “…the stories of the people closest to her.”

A September 2020 article appearing in The Artiface, titled “Expressing Mental Health Through Street Art” is an exploration of the work of Australian artist Thomas Readett, who the article describes as having “…made a name for himself by unearthing his darkness and turning it into art” where “…many of the subjects of his portraits are captured in a state of emotional turmoil, either breaking into tears or screaming” (I find that the screaming connotation seems to be a direct line back to Munch).

ARTIFACT 8 - Video: Carson Daily. “HOW A STREET ARTIST COPES WITH HIS DEPRESSION” Today Show / YouTube, 26 Apr 2021.

The video also notes how TrustyScribe’s stenciled bubble texts have spread around the world via posts on social media platforms such as Instagram.

Graffiti street artist TrustyScribe, in an April 2021 Today Show interview with Carson Daily, as seen in ARTIFACT 8, to the right, discusses how his own depression spurred his desire to create street art that might help people deal with their own mental health. A lot of his work, like the street work of Rambo’s and Basquiat’s, are word based works. One such piece featured in the interview says: “Please excuse my depression, it has a mind of its own” and “I don’t want to kill myself, I just don’t wan to be here anymore.”

In 2019, ABC News’s Sophie Flay, in a piece called “Street Artists Paint Mental Health Awareness Message,” it is revealed how TrustyScribe collaborated with London street artist The Postman, to create a mural in Hollywood which served as a tribute to Robin Williams, and to shed light on mental health issues. In 2021, the website Totally London, published a piece called “Meet the Londoner: The Street Artists of the Postman Art” in which The Postman is interviewed about his street art work which utilizes paste-ups (also known as wheat paste) to create and distribute the work.

ARTIFACT 9 - Photo: TrustyScribe / The Postman. “Just Because I’m Smiling, Doesn’t Mean I’m Happy.” Impermanent Art / Tumblr, 13 May 2019.

ARTIFACT 10 - Video: Book a Street Artist. “Brave Together: 4 female street artists - Graffiti advertising for Maybelline Berlin.” YouTube, 26 OCT 2021.

Finally, an October 26 2021 article on the Basa Studio website, called “Breaking taboos with Maybelline Berlin: Tape and graffiti advertising for mental health awareness” by Kylie Bolton, explores the creation of a large mural which “…depicts 4 different women bravely breaking the taboo of mental health by expressing their own vulnerable emotions… at the famous East Side Gallery in Berlin.” On one level, I do find this work to be problematic in that it’s sponsored by, and had its parameters set by a large, multinational cosmetics firm - but on another level, it does give voice to an important issue by creating a street art mural that might last a little bit longer than some murals do - and it also helps to give media attention to the artwork itself, as well as to four prominent female street artists. The artwork can be seen in ARTIFACT 9.

2. The Unexpected / Uplifting Surprises in the Streets: This theme is a born of the theme of having a street art exhibit focused on mental health and depression - by seeking out and bringing together works of art that are unexpected and perhaps a bit uplifting by their formal design and content.

My interest in this as a theme is tied to the work of Vancouver street artist Wrk(less), whose street art plays with a variety of pop-culture references through the placement of the work in unexpected places, as seen in this 2017 article by The Daily Hive, “Vancouver Doorway Turned into Giant R2D2.”

Another 2017 article from Untapped New York, called “This Mural Arts Project Uses Street Art to Start Conversations about Mental Illness in NYC” and it’s a show inspired by a similar show that has been run in Philadelphia for over 30 years, and it brings together the community and street artists to create large murals that explore this theme.

I particularly love Banksy-esque Iranian artist Hamid NikKhah, whose playful work serves to inform his interests in activism, consumerism as well as nature. I love his image of two kids in a radio flyer like wagon. It seems mundane enough, until you notice the cans of spray paint in the cart with the little girl. I also like his play on the prevalence of security cameras and social media - it kind of begs the question of how they are different but similar too.

Marianna Phillips, an artist in Austin, Texas, predominantly uses butterfly imagery she creates and places in public spaces. Speaking on her website, Phillips notes how the @weirdlittlelines project exists to create “…experimental works (that) draws the viewer into a whimsical world rooted in reality - reframing our relationship with the present & illustrating that anything is possible through the power of imagination.”

Manchester street artist Tasha Whittle (aka the colouring box) creates work that is playful and whimsical in both it’s formal style and in the stories that are told, as illustrated by this work, “Sneaky Afro kitten” and “this is the place.”

Other artists that could be considered for such a show (some could even be considered for a show about depression): @6zo6real’s street poll lego heads, and @kennyrandom (Faraway, so close…).

3. The Environment & Climate Change / Rewilding - Keeping the Earth Clean: This is another theme I’ve been drawn to exploring - and as with the first two articles - it’s a theme that has no shortage of graffiti and street artists exploring. I didn’t look into this too much, but stumbled upon this October 2014 article by Blaze Press about moss graffiti.

B. PARTICULAR CITY, SITE, PLACE, OR MUSEUM

1. Surrey, British Columbia, Canada: I’m tempted to choose a city like Vancouver, but Vancouver already has a huge presence of unsanctioned graffiti and sanctioned street art murals, so I thought it might be nice to look at a city that has little of either. In addition to having little of either, Surrey has a very active anti-graffiti task force that paints over any graffiti that might appear relatively quickly.

Tying this idea into the topic of depression and addiction, next to Vancouver, the City of Surrey had the second highest number of illicit drug toxicity deaths for ten years now, topping 283 deaths in 2021. There are likely many other stats about depression and other related themes available online.

ARTIFACT 11 - Photo: Tina Lovegreen. “Newton Street Art.” CBC News, 11 May 2017.

2. Specific Parts of Surrey: Surrey has such a wide geographical footprint that one could refine its use for a show that has art made on the streets, to be focused on a specific part of Surrey, such as Surrey City Centre, Newton, or South Surrey / White Rock. This might make movability easier for people to walk around and view the works (although some parts of Surrey City Centre and Newton are more disadvantaged than others - that is, some parts are a bit sketchy and might not be the best place to have people wander around in), as is done with the Vancouver Mural Festival. Newton contains maybe the most murals in the city, as representative of one done in 2017, shown in ARTIFACT 11.

3. Surrey Art Gallery: Sticking to Surrey, a show featuring urban, graffiti and street art could work in a gallery space. If the show focussed on artists who have lost their lives to mental health issues such as addiction and depression - then a gallery space could feature their artwork more easily by serving as a kind of retrospective of sorts.

An institution like this could also serve as a means for bringing urban, graffiti and street art into city owned and managed areas such as parks - specifically the parkour and skateboard parks that exist (I’m thinking here of one at Bear Creek Park and another at the South Surrey Recreation Centre and Park grounds).

C. PARTICULAR FORM OF GRAFFITI / STREET ART

1. Graffiti Tags / Word Phrases: I’m attracted to artists that play with words and word phrases, as seen by Basquiat, @caroleloeffler, @Publicdisplayofawareness, and @TrustyScribe.

2. Stickers: I’m attracted to the speed with which stickers can be produced and distributed across a city. Traditionally used to bomb a writer’s name, I have stumbled across stickers that move past the use of tags and the throwie style for the lettering of names - to incorporate word phrases, and visual imagery as well. Artists like Ji Lee, in what he called The Bubble Project, have also shown how stickering can provide an interactive experience as well, as he distributed and stuck empty comic speech-bubbles onto advertisements, allowing passers-by to write in their own captions. @_boxhed_ , and It’s Just Love Project by @t_the_illustrator.

3. Reverse graffiti: can be really beautiful - appearing like a negative or even a charcoal drawing that uses a process of removal to reveal an image. The Art Story website describes this process as: “…a method by which artists create images on walls or other surfaces by removing dirt from a surface. According to British reverse graffiti artist Moose, "Once you do this, you make people confront whether or not they like people cleaning walls or if they really have a problem with personal expression." This sort of work calls attention to environmental concerns in urban spaces, such as pollution.”” The website also notes that it is also known as “…clean tagging, dust tagging, grime writing, clean graffiti, green graffiti, or clean advertising." Widewalls also had an excellent article about the process.

D. PARTICULAR MOVEMENTS / MOMENTS IN GRAFFITI / STREET ART

ARTIFACT 12 - Video: PBS News Hour “Beyond the Streets LA exhibit showcases street art.” YouTube, 28 May 2018.

1. Graffiti & Street Art Origins & History: BEYOND THE STREET LA was a 2018 show that really dived into the history of graffiti and street art in Los Angeles, as highlighted in ARTIFACT 12, a video with curator Roger Gastman.

2. From the street to the gallery: Seeing how artists move from the street into the studios has been a movement that’s existed alongside graffiti and street art across it’s entire history, most notably starting in the 1980s. BEYOND THE STREET was a show from 2011 that was more about the movement of street artists from the street and into the gallery.

3. The Underbelly Project: In Lori Zimmer’s book, THE ART OF SPRAY PAINT, she reveals a fascinating New York City graffiti project that focused on creating graffiti and street artworks in places that were inaccessible to the general public - usually in abandoned subway tunnels among other places. How cool would it be to create such a show in Vancouver? At one time, Vancouver as well as other Metro Vancouver cities, such as New Westminster, has a history of various underground tunnels and other hidden places which have been discussed in local news media articles:

Bollwitt, Rebecca. “Tunnels under Downtown: Vancouver History.” Miss 604, 14 Jul 2010.
Brown, Scott. “The Tunnels of Vancouver.” Vancouver Sun, 25 Feb 2015.
CBC News. “Inside the wilderness shrouding a piece of Vancouver's history.” CBC, 14 Mar 2020.
Donaldson, Jesse. “The Burrard Street Bridge’s Hidden Stairwell.” MonteCristo Magazine, 2016.
Donaldson, Jesse. “The Museum of Anthropology’s Secret Tunnels.” MonteCristo Magazine, 2018.
Gill, Meagan. “Off-Limits Vancouver: 7 Hidden Places We’ll Likely Never Get To See.” 604 Now.
Gulamhusein, Nasreen. “Vancouver’s Historic Tunnels.” MonteCristo Magazine, 2009 / 2018.
McClachlan, Stacey. “Are There Secret Tunnels Underneath UBC?” Vancouver Magazine, 22 May 2018.

E. PARTICULAR ARTIST FOCUS FOR GROUP EXHIBIT OR RETROSPECTIVE SHOW

1. Hambleton Comes Home: Why hasn’t any Vancouver gallery space, or even the Vancouver Art Gallery, done a show featuring the work of Hambleton? Emily Carr? A private space?

2. i-Heart: Another Vancouver artist that is deserving of a show. His work is evocative of Banksy, and is deserving of recognition.

3. Kennyrandom: This graffiti artist to me evokes Hambleton’s shadowman figure in an entirely unique way, that has his dark figures playing with more colourful and absurdist elements.

Header Image: Jean-Michel Basquiat. Self-Portrait. Acrylic on Canvas, 180 x 260.5 cm, MACBA, 1986.

Instructor Feedback…

This assignment was due by 11:55pm on Tuesday, May 31, 2022. But due to personal health issues I was unable to complete it until Monday, June 6, 2022. This particular professor offers no concessions on any of the assignments, so I chose not to approach her my about any of my issues that came up over the past two weeks. As per the course outline, had I not submitted anything by the end of June 7, I would have received a failing grade of 0 on the assignment.

READING ANALYSIS

Laurie A. Rodrigues, “’SAMO as an Escape Clause’: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Engagment with a Commodified American Africanism” in Journal of American Studies (May, 2011)