May 4th: Jordana Moore Saggese in conversation with Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw

Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Jordana Moore Saggese will discuss her books Reading Basquiat and the Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader with Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw.

The live event will stream directly on this page on Tuesday, May 4th at 6pm EST. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards. During the broadcast, please email your questions to evan@192books.com.

Jordana Moore Saggese – Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art (University of California Press, 2021)

Before his death at the age of twenty-seven, Jean-Michel Basquiat completed nearly 2,000 works. These unique compositions—collages of text and gestural painting across a variety of media—quickly 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 expressionism. Jordana Moore Saggese argues that Basquiat, once known as “the black Picasso,” probes not only the boundaries of blackness but also the boundaries of American art. Weaving together the artist’s interests in painting, writing, and music, this groundbreaking book expands the parameters of aesthetic discourse to consider the parallels Basquiat found among these disciplines in his exploration of the production of meaning. Most important, Reading Basquiat traces the ways in which Basquiat constructed large parts of his identity—as a black man, as a musician, as a painter, and as a writer—via the manipulation of texts in his own library.

The Jean Michel Basquiat Reader: Writings, Interviews, and Critical Responses – edited by Jordana Moore Saggese (University of California Press, 2021)

The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader is the first comprehensive sourcebook on the artist, closing gaps that have until now limited the sustained study and definitive archiving of his work and its impact.

Eight years after his first exhibition, Basquiat was dead, but his popularity has only grown. Through a combination of interviews with the artist, criticism from the artist’s lifetime and immediately after, previously unpublished research by the author, and a selection of the most important critical essays on the artist’s work, this collectionprovides a full picture of the artist’s views on art and culture, his working process, and the critical significance of his work both then and now.

Jordana Moore Saggese is an Associate Professor of American Art at the University of Maryland, College Park and Editor-in-Chief of the College Art Association’s Art Journal. She was previously Associate Professor of Contemporary Art & Theory at California College of the Arts. Trained as an art historian, Saggese’s work focuses on modern and contemporary American art with an emphasis on the expressions and theorizations of blackness. She is an internationally recognized expert on the work of the American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is the Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Chair in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in art history from Stanford University and has served on the faculty of Harvard University and as the Senior Historian and Director of Research, Publications, and Scholarly Programs at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. She is the author of numerous publications on the art and culture of the United States, with an emphasis on issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality.