Designed to be a closed door, Basquiat’s work holds no warm welcome for those who approach it with a narrow Eurocentric gaze. That gaze which can recognize Basquiat only if he is in the company of Warhol or some other highly visible white figure. That gaze which can value Basquiat only if he can be seen as part of a continuum of contemporary American art with a genealogy traced through white males: Pollock, de Kooning, Rauschenberg, Twombly, and on to Andy. Rarely does anyone connect Basquiat’s work to traditions of African-American art history. While it is obvious that Basquiat was influenced and inspired by the work of established white male artists, the content of his work does not neatly converge with theirs.

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When the art critic Thomas McEvilley suggests that “this black artist was doing exactly what classical-Modernist white artists such as Picasso and George Braque had done: deliberately echoing a primitive style,” he erases all of Basquiat’s distinct connections to a cultural and ancestral memory that linked him directly to “primitive” traditions. This then allows McEvilley to make the absurd suggestion that Basquiat was “behaving like white men who think they are behaving like black men”…