Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American painter from Brooklyn, of Haitian and Puerto Rican parentage, who first became known for the graffiti tag SAMO in lower Manhattan. In the early 1980s he rose quickly to fame with raw, crowded paintings of skulls, crowns, words and figures that confront race, power and history. He worked with Andy Warhol on a series of joint paintings. He died of a heroin overdose at 27, and his work now sells for some of the highest prices of any American artist.