Before his death at the age of twenty-seven, Jean-Michel Basquiat completed nearly 2,000 works. These unique compositionscollages of text and gestural painting across a variety of mediaquickly made Basquiat one of the most important and widely known artists of the 1980s. Reading Basquiat provides a new approach to understanding the range and impact of this artist s practice, as well as its complex relationship to several key artistic and ideological debates of the late twentieth century, including the instability of identity, the role of appropriation, and the boundaries of...