When Obie Award-winning actor, writer and director Roger Guenveur Smith, met the late Jean-Michel Basquiat on an LA dance floor in the ’80s, it was friendship at first sight.
“I was rapping and … he was attracted to my energy, and I was attracted to his hairdo,” said Smith when asked about his first impression of Basquiat. They hit it off immediately, with Smith later learning Basquiat was the latest up-and-coming prodigy in the New York City art scene.
The sparks of their 40 year-long friendship burned bright after they met and continued after Basquiat passed away from a drug overdose. Smith’s inspiration from Basquiat culminated in the form of performance, his medium — a one-man show.
Smith performed his deeply sentimental act, “In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat,” on the evening of April 23 at the Stevenson Event Center, organized by the Cultural Arts and Diversity (CAD) Resource Center to commemorate the late artist’s legacy.
Basquiat was a Puerto Rican and Haitian American artist known for his success during the neo-expressionism movement. His career began with graffiti across the streets of downtown Manhattan with his friend Al Diaz under the duo name SAMO (‘Same Old Shit’). Basquiat began exhibiting his work in art galleries, depicting his unique experience as a Black man in New York City.
With about 60 community members in attendance, Smith’s show mirrored Basquiat’s livelihood through poetic storytelling and music, with improvisational physicality that moved the crowd. When working on his art, Basquiat listened to music to get into a flow, and the sprinkled-in rhythms in the show were an ode to his artistic process.
Smith seamlessly shifts between several characters throughout the show, making subtle changes in his body language, voice and facial expressions.
Basquiat is also admired for using his art to address societal issues, such as racial stereotypes surrounding Black artists and the entertainment industry, as seen in his 1983 collection “Hollywood Africans.”
“People commodify artists and [they] commercialized [Basquiat’s] death,” said Selah Hyson, marketer for CAD, member of the Black Student Union and volunteer for Engaging Education, who helped organize the event. “It’s important for students to understand that Black people are people too, we’re not just our work that we produce, we’re not just the result of our labor, we have whole lives and stories.”
At the beginning of the show, Smith imitated an auction of one of Basquiat’s famous paintings, “Untitled (Crown),” painted in 1982. His introduction satirizes auctions, which are typically seen as white-dominated, “respectable” spaces for the upper class to commodify what artists produce, rather than acknowledge their personhood. Smith’s fervent, dramatic yelling of bids and offers into the crowd, “$1,000 here! $2,000, do I hear $5,000?” ending with the line, “you will be more valuable to people dead than alive,” serves as a moral realization to the audience that oftentimes the work artists leave behind is stripped of its humanity for profit.
In the Q&A portion after the performance, Smith described the inspiration for the show as being a type of “survivor’s guilt.” Smith said he feels a sense of duty to serve justice to Basquiat’s life and memory beyond what can be found online.
Smith performs the show barefoot, alluding to Basquiat’s portrait on a 1985 New York Times Magazine cover.
“The function of this piece is to rehumanize Jean-Michel and center him as a dynamically talented young person. Someone who was very much connected to heritage, to legacy, history.”
The audience’s response reflected what Smith hoped to achieve from his performance — for others to recognize Basquiat for who he was aside from what he created.
“Recognize that the work is not simply paint on canvas,” Smith said in an interview with City on a Hill Press. “There’s a lot of musicality, a lot of history, a lot of philosophy, a lot of pain, a lot of tragedy, which goes into creating this work. It’s not just a one dimensional piece of art … it’s a life.”
