Liz Munsell is Lorraine and Alan Bressier Curator of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Greg Tate is a New York-based writer, musician and cultural provocateur.
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.
*S Magazine*
[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...
*Smithsonian*
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.
*ARLIS/NA Reviews*
[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.
*Washington Post*
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.
*Art Newspaper*
...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.
*Boston Globe*
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.
*Art In America*
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.
*Vanity Fair*
...to leaf through this prodigy’s oeuvre intermingled with photos
of what he called “just … you know, my friends and stuff”; of their
tags brightening storefronts and subway cars, of the boomboxes and
leather jackets and reference books they at once desecrated and
elevated, is to hold in your hands the record of a place and a time
and a togetherness we can only hope one day to experience
again.
*New York Times*
Writing the Future' differentiates itself as the first major
exhibition to contextualize Basquiat’s work in relation to his
peers associated with hip-hop culture.
*Forbes: Media*
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