Jean-Michel Basquiat is one of the best-known artists of his generation and is widely considered one of the most important artists of the 20th century.  His career in art spanned the late 1970s through the 1980s until his death in 1988, at the age of 27.

Basquiat's works are edgy and raw, and through a bold sense of color and composition, he maintains a fine balance between seemingly contradictory forces such as control and spontaneity, menace and wit, urban imagery, and primitivism. The Basquiat brand embodies the values and aspirations of young, international urban culture.

Basquiat often incorporated words into his paintings. Before his career, as a painter began, he produced punk-inspired postcards for sale on the street and became known for the political–poetical graffiti under the name of SAMO. 

The conjunction of various media is an integral element of Basquiat's art. His paintings are typically covered with text and codes of all kinds: words, letters, numerals, pictograms, logos, map symbols, diagrams, and more, and featured multi-panel paintings and individual canvases with exposed stretcher bars, the surface dense with writing, collage, and imagery.