Soho House Location

During pride month, participants of our Sip & Collage community workshop learned about artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Born in 1960 in New York to a Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat began his artistic career selling post cards and sweatshirts. He began as a graffiti artists on the streets of the city and eventually began putting his works on canvas. By the 1980s he rose to fame and began befriending other prominent artists of the time such as Andy Warhol. His pieces began selling for considerable amounts of money. His works often were centered around his Caribbean heritage featuring people of color, famous athletes and musicians, and crowns. He often used crowns to portray black people in his pieces through a regal lens. His art discussed themes of racism, classism, power structures, and social issues of the time. Though often labeled as bisexual, he was described to have been attracted to people not for their appearance, but for their personalities. In which case he might be considered to be more pansexual by today’s standards - but we must note as always that labels can never fully explain or represent the queer experience.