Just back from the opening of Ai Weiwei’s latest blockbuster show, Andy Warhol—Ai Weiwei at Australia’s NGV, collector Larry Warsh, who helped bring that exhibition into being, learned that his Brooklyn Museum show of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s notebooks had been chosen by Hyperallergic as the best Brooklyn show of 2015.
The Basquiat notebooks will travel to Atlanta’s High Museum, the Perez in Miami and finally on to Cleveland in 2016. Andy Warhol—Ai Weiwei comes to Pittsburgh’s Warhol museum some time in 2016 too. When Ai attends the opening, it will be the first time he has entered the United States since his release from house arrest in China.
Here’s Hyperallergic on the notebooks:
Even though writing (graffiti or otherwise) was an important part of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s formation, people often ignore his notebooks and overlook his use of language as an integral part of his visual art.
Lists made up the bulk of this exhibition, as pages from Basquiat’s hardcover notebooks were displayed for the world to read. After a while you got into the rhythm and saw the style he cultivated on every page. He effortlessly played the strings of words to create visual music, and the exhibition was just dense enough to demonstrate larger patterns and how much he was engaging with mass media and corporate brands. Basquiat the poet painter came very clearly into focus. —Hrag Vartanian
Best of 2015: Our Top 10 Brooklyn Art Shows (Hyperallergic)
