On March 11, 2005, the Brooklyn Museum opened Basquiat, a major retrospective devoted to Jean-Michel Basquiat in the borough where he was born and first encountered museums as a child. The exhibition gathered more than one hundred works and emphasized chronology, music, language, Afro-Caribbean imagery, collage, and silkscreen techniques. Its venue mattered: Brooklyn reframed Basquiat not only as a downtown New York prodigy or 1980s market phenomenon, but as an artist whose Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage, graffiti-era formation, and painting practice belonged in a longer modernist history. The show later traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
The exhibition helped consolidate Basquiat's museum canon for a broad post-2000 audience.
