📍57 Great Jones Street, New York, NY 10012, USA
1983 – 1988“I was born in Brooklyn in 1960 to a Haitian father, Gerard, an accountant, and a Puerto Rican mother, Matilde, who took me to the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art from the age of five, encouraged me to draw and even enrolled me as a junior member of the Brooklyn Museum. When I was seven a car hit me while I was playing in the street, and I spent weeks in hospital; to keep me occupied, my mother brought me a copy of Gray's Anatomy, and its drawings of bones and organs stayed in my art forever. I left home as a teenager, slept on friends' floors and spray-painted cryptic SAMO poems across downtown Manhattan. By my early twenties I was famous. In 1983 I rented 57 Great Jones Street, a two-storey former stable in NoHo owned by my friend Andy Warhol, and made it my home and studio, painting through the night with music playing and canvases everywhere. I lived and worked there until 1988. A plaque now marks the building, and part of the street has been named Jean-Michel Basquiat Way.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
🛰️ Satellite view · © Google