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20TH CENTURY MOVEMENTS

PUBLISHER
MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 9.5 x 10.75 in. / 200 pgs / 200 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2020 p. 3   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780878468713 TRADE
List Price: $50.00 CDN $69.95 GBP £35.00

AVAILABILITY
Out of stock

TERRITORY
WORLD

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE

Boston, MA
Museum of Fine Arts, 04/05/20–08/02/20

Miami, FL
Pérez Art Museum Miami, 09/19/20–02/14/21

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MFA PUBLICATIONS, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON

Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation

Edited by Liz Munsell, Greg Tate. Text by J. Faith Almiron, Dakota DeVos, Hua Hsu, Carlo McCormick.

Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation

How hip-hop culture and graffiti electrified the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat and his contemporaries in 1980s New York

In the early 1980s, art and writing labeled as graffiti began to transition from New York City walls and subway trains onto canvas and into art galleries. Young artists who freely sampled from their urban experiences and their largely Black, Latinx and immigrant histories infused the downtown art scene with expressionist, pop and graffiti-inspired compositions.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88) became the galvanizing, iconic frontrunner of this transformational and insurgent movement in contemporary American art, which resulted in an unprecedented fusion of creative energies that defied longstanding racial divisions. Writing the Future features Basquiat’s works in painting, sculpture, drawing, video, music and fashion, alongside works by his contemporaries—and sometimes collaborators—A-One, ERO, Fab 5 Freddy, Futura, Keith Haring, Kool Koor, LA2, Lady Pink, Lee Quiñones, Rammellzee and Toxic. Throughout the 1980s, these artists fueled new directions in fine art, design and music, reshaping the predominantly white art world and driving the now-global popularity of hip-hop culture.

Writing the Future, published to accompany a major exhibition, contextualizes Basquiat’s work in relation to his peers associated with hip-hop culture. It also marks the first time Basquiat’s extensive, robust and reflective portraiture of his Black and Latinx friends and fellow artists has been given prominence in scholarship on his oeuvre. With contributions from Carlo McCormick, Liz Munsell, Hua Hsu, J. Faith Almiron and Greg Tate, Writing the Future captures the energy, inventiveness and resistance unleashed when hip-hop hit the city.


Fab 5 Freddy's "Five" (1980–81) is reproduced from 'Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation.'

PRAISE AND REVIEWS
al influences, collaborators, and friends, and does not isolate him from the moment in time that enabled his rapid rise to fame.

Smithsonian

Nora McGreevy

[Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation] traces how a group of young artists involved in the hip-hop scene went from tagging subway cars to participating in the mainstream, white-dominated art world...

S Magazine

David Saric

A seminal survey of 80s graffiti and street art, this book features the works of Basquiat alongside his contemporaries including Keith Harring, Lady Pink, Fab 5 Freddy and others. Black, Latinx and immigrant stories are translated through a form of artistic expression that moved from the boroughs and into galev'>In these flattened times, Writing the Future conveys motion. The book, a companion to a suspended exhibition at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, is about Basquiat, his contemporaries, and early hip-hop culture, but it’s also about the movements and rhythms of New York City—'the work of the subway writers became as optically and optimally omnipresent as the Manhattan skyline,' Greg Tate writes. And in its dynamic blend of art, history, and analysis, it has a movement of its own.

Art In America

Damon Krukowski

Munsell’s argument isn’t about tracing Basquiat’s origins as an artist, or repeating a standard narrative about how graffiti and street art were formative experiences leading up to his masterpieces on canvas. Instead, Munsell makes a point of anchoring his complete career in this context. [...] For 'Writing the Future,' Munsell and co-curator Greg Tate place Basquiat’s now familiar and extraordinarily expensive paintings in and among work that has largely been ignored by blue-chip galleries and auction houses.

Boston Globe

Murray Whyte

...Feel like the most important exhibition on Basquiat you’ll ever see, and he’s just one artist among the show’s dozen. [...] It’s wildly evocative and transporting — holistic, immersive, experiential, and far greater than the sum of its 120-plus parts.

Art Newspaper

Gabriella Angeleti

From the streets to the studio: [Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation] explores how Basquiat, graffiti and hip-hop culture stormed the art world in the 1980s.

Washington Post

Sebastian Smee

[T]here’s more to this exhibition than putting Basquiat in context. It’s about a bigger phenomenon — a struggle for visibility that spilled over into hyper-visibility. It addresses a key period in Black creativity and urban youth culture, an extended moment too little understood by a mainstream culture that consigns it to the margins even as it swims in the very conditions it created.

ARLIS/NA Reviews

Jasmine Burns

This catalog is a true companion to a physical exhibit. Instead of acting as a monograph for the “lone genius artist,” a typical trope in the history of western art, the exhibit tells the story of a community of artists, all with varying levels of notoriety within their own circles and the art world at large. The texts and images weave a story that calls upon all five senses by referencing music, visual arts, film, and dance. The exhibit catalog presents Basquiat as his whole self, which includes his cultural influences, collaborators, and friends, and does not isolate him from the moment in time that enabled his rapid rise to fame.

Smithsonian

Nora McGreevy

[Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation] traces how a group of young artists involved in the hip-hop scene went from tagging subway cars to participating in the mainstream, white-dominated art world...

S Magazine

David Saric

A seminal survey of 80s graffiti and street art, this book features the works of Basquiat alongside his contemporaries including Keith Harring, Lady Pink, Fab 5 Freddy and others. Black, Latinx and immigrant stories are translated through a form of artistic expression that moved from the boroughs and into galleries across the world.

Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation

STATUS: Out of stock

Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory.

FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/20/2020

Futura, Writing the Future

Futura, Writing the Future

"Untitled" (1982) and "Boombox" (1983), both by Futura, are reproduced from Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation, the superb catalog to the blockbuster exhibition on view at MFA Boston now. One of our Staff Pick Holiday Gift Books for Art Lovers, 2020, this is also a must-have historical document for anyone following the artist's career, suddenly aflame again after a 30 year hiatus, with two shows up in New York and a recent collection out with the inimitable Japanese fashion label, Comme des Garçons—all included in a recent profile by Max Lakin in the New York Times. "Graffiti had found the speed at which it needed to be seen," Futura is quoted in Writing the Future. "To keep in step with the fast pace of communication and information sharing." How right he was, and how fresh his work looks now. continue to blog


FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/17/2020

Carlo McCormick on 'Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation'

Carlo McCormick on 'Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation'

Jean-Michel Basquiat's "In Italian" (1983) is reproduced from Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation, one of the most vibrant exhibition catalogs of the year, and maybe the decade. An exploration of how hip-hop culture and graffiti electrified the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat and his contemporaries in 1980s New York, "this is the story of the stories that were told, with tremendous urgency and at great peril, when no one seemed to listen or to care what these kids had to say," Carlo McCormick writes in his superb essay. 'It’s about a time, long ago now for even those of us who lived through it, when fantastical urban myths were spun and legends were born. Yes, it’s about the fame of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Fab 5 Freddy’s social fabrics, Futura’s atmospheric attacks, the cult hero Lee, and the equation known as Rammellzee. It’s also about the diverse evolution of graffiti into a radical ornamentation of Gothic Futurism as well as the kind of visual poetics and narrative force unleashed when a relatively few graffiti writers understood they could say so much more than their names. But it is also about the conversation and connectivity that spun a web of intricate social interface and influence within a small but dense creative community over a remarkably short period of time. It’s about how the word was spread and splayed, transmitted, transmuted and transgressed along the way into a wild style of rapid and radical hybridity. If history does rhyme but not repeat, let’s try to imagine how a generation set loose on the dance floor–street corner–playground could suddenly find a shared beat and mutual dialect with the gatekeepers of high art in the 1980s. Individuals may assert their singularity—their individual class, race, identity—but in the density of the city at this moment, they moved together." continue to blog


FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/29/2020

A sudden thrill from Rammellzee in 'Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation'

A sudden thrill from Rammellzee in 'Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation'

Rammellzee's "Super Robber" (1985) is reproduced from Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation, published to accompany the highly-anticipated exhibition currently on hiatus at MFA Boston. Featuring work by Jean-Michel Basquiat and 1980s NYC contemporaries including A-One, ERO, Fab 5 Freddy, Futura, Keith Haring, Kool Koor, LA2, Lady Pink, Lee Quiñones, Rammellzee and Toxic, this is a must-have book for any serious contemporary art or pop culture library. J. Faith Almiron writes, “Fearsome and fearless, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Rammellzee commanded the cosmos. Their street politics and poetics awakened the dead—from ancestors dwelling in the Atlantic or the Mississippi River to monks marooned in catacombs. Sons of Thor, they commanded the sea and sky. No Earth needed; as told in African American folklore, they were the people who could fly.” continue to blog


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