The art museum may be closed to visitors but that’s not stopping its most anticipated exhibition.
Despite the fact that the Museum of Fine Art Boston has closed its doors to visitors due to the coronavirus pandemic, it will still be launching its highly anticipated “Writing the Future: Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation” online for art lovers to peruse from the comfort of home.
MFA Boston will be launching a virtual edition of the exhibition on its website in the coming weeks. The sprawling vernissage will feature a wide range of the visionary’s work across a variety of mediums, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, videos and music, all dating back to 1980s New York City..
“Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation illuminates how this group’s subversive abstractions of both visual and verbal language—including neo-expressionism, freestyle sampling, and wildstyle lettering—rocketed their creative voices onto the main stages of international art and music,” the museum said of the show in a statement on its website.
“It is the first major exhibition to contextualize Basquiat’s work in relation to hip-hop and marks the first time his extensive, robust, and reflective portraiture of his Black and Latinx friends and fellow artists has been given prominence in scholarship on his oeuvre.”
Despite his early passing (Basquiat died at the age of 27) the artist is continuously credited for his influence in the 1980s New York art scene—where his work was available for the world to see, from prestigious galleries to graffiti-ladened subway cars.
The star of the exhibition is undeniably the painting Hollywood Africans, which showcases Toxic and Rammellzee, the artists and philosophers who Basquiat notably took inspiration from in a multitude of his works.
“Throughout the 1980s, these artists fueled new directions in fine art, design and music, driving the now-global popularity of hip-hop culture,” the museum noted. “The exhibition illuminates how this generation’s subversive abstractions of both visual and verbal language—including neo-expressionism, freestyle sampling and wildstyle lettering—rocketed their creative voices onto the main stages of international art and music.”
The original exhibition was intended to run from April 5 to August 2, however, it’s expected to be available virtually in the coming weeks.