Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols
Opening June 25, 2026 | Pérez Art Museum Miami
Basquiat in Miami: Reclaiming the Language of Power
The forthcoming exhibition Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols at the Pérez Art Museum Miami marks a rare and intellectually rigorous return to the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat beyond the spectacle of the market and popular culture. Bringing together nearly a dozen works—primarily from the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection—this focused presentation offers an unusually concentrated encounter with Basquiat’s visual language.
Rather than overwhelming the viewer with scale, the exhibition privileges depth. Across nine paintings and a rarely exhibited sculptural work, Basquiat’s practice unfolds through three central axes: the figure, language, and symbolic construction. His persistent return to the human head—most notably in Untitled (1982)—reveals not merely anatomy, but a psychological and historical site, charged with memory, violence, and resilience.
Basquiat’s engagement with language remains one of his most radical contributions. In works such as In Italian (1983), text becomes both structure and disruption—fragmented, coded, and layered—operating simultaneously as image, thought, and resistance. Here, painting becomes a field of competing narratives, where art history, autobiography, and cultural critique collide.
The Miami context is not incidental. As a city shaped by diaspora, migration, and layered identities, it offers a critical framework for understanding Basquiat’s Caribbean heritage and his interrogation of race, class, and power.
Co-curated by Franklin Sirmans and Megan Kincaid, the exhibition proposes a necessary shift: to see Basquiat not as an icon, but as a rigorous architect of meaning. In this sense, Figures, Signs, Symbols is less a retrospective than an invitation—to slow down, to read, and to confront the complexity embedded in every mark.
