Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols
PAMM
June 25, 2026 – June 6, 2027
It is nearly impossible to look at a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat today without thinking about the price tag. His face is on tote bags; his crown logo is on sneakers — at this point, you almost have to fight through the merch to remember there’s an actual painting involved, that the actual physical objects he created in his brief, blindingly prolific career are constantly at risk of being obscured by their own mythology.
Yet, when you stand in front of the real thing, all that cultural noise falls away. These paintings have a unique mystical aura around them, and to truly appreciate them, they must be admired in person due to the different textures and to truly appreciate their depth.
“Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols,” now on view at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) until June 6, 2027, offers a welcome, clarifying reminder of exactly why this artist matters. Co-curated by PAMM director Franklin Sirmans and Megan Kincaid, the exhibition brings together ten masterworks from the collection of billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin. Ten is a modest number, but the scale of the show is its greatest asset. It replaces the exhausting blockbuster retrospective format with a highly concentrated dose of Basquiat’s relentless pictorial intelligence, with a few selected works.
Basquiat was, first and foremost, an extraordinary colorist and a draftsman of ravenous appetite with a sophisticated style and marks. The works at PAMM bristle with his signature collision of references: Renaissance anatomical diagrams, corporate logos, comic book heroes, and the syncopated rhythms of 1980s New York hip-hop and graffiti. He could pull graffiti, slang, street noise — all of it — into a gallery context, and somehow it didn’t get sanitized. The friction stayed. He moved from graffiti to painting on anything he could find, to finally putting them all on canvases.
The exhibition emphasizes how his portraiture merged with coded language and scribbles. He’d write something, cross it out, write it again — you’re never quite sure if you’re reading a statement or watching him argue with himself. Words are written, crossed out, and rewritten, drawing the viewer’s eye not just to what is being said, but to what is being deliberately withheld or revised. This was an artist acutely aware of history and his place within it. Born in Brooklyn to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat synthesized a visual vocabulary steeped in the African diaspora, making PAMM—a museum situated at the crossroads of the Caribbean and the Americas—a remarkably resonant venue for this work.
Among the pieces on view is his 1985 untitled “Box” sculpture, which underscores his fluidity across mediums and his instinct for turning the detritus of urban life into sacred reliquaries and contemporary art. Whether working on canvas, wood, or found objects, Basquiat’s line remains unmistakably his own: urgent, jagged, and nervously alive. There’s a desperation to the work — like he knew he had too much to say and not enough time, which, as it turned out, he didn’t.
Because his imagery is so immediate, the temptation is to consume his paintings quickly. But to do so is to miss the profound structural rigor beneath the frenetic surface.
“These paintings demand that kind of slow experience,” notes PAMM director Franklin Sirmans.
He is entirely right. Basquiat’s canvases are not just graphic explosions; they are paintings that have actual structural bones under all that chaos and need a slow digestion. When given the space to breathe, free from the suffocating hype of the auction house, you stop seeing the myth and start seeing the actual thinking — and it turns out the thinking was a lot more rigorous than the auction prices would have you believe, but not just a flash-in-the-pan 80s phenomenon but someone who was genuinely in conversation with centuries of art history, whether the art world wanted to admit it or not. This focused, quietly intense exhibition strips away the icon and returns us to the painter. The one and only, Jean-Michel Basquiat.