Basquiat Religion

This class focused on exploring the intersections between religion, Afrofuturism and popular culture. For this paper, I will analyze the works and career of Basquiat, a Brooklyn-born neo-expressionist artist whose work focused on challenging the unchallenged. By utilizing religious and cosmic iconography in his works, Basquiat made creative references to Afrofuturism, and analyzing his paintings, interviews, and quotes helps to generate a better understanding of this course’s themes as a whole.
For example, in John-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 untitled painting of the devil, he creates a self-portrait, illustrating his own inner self demons as well as portraying the controlling images projected upon him by society (Long 187). As an innovative black

The painting’s title is a syrupy ode to the sickeningly sweet American Dream, a corrupt system built upon the subjugation of the black community.
Also, Basquiat engages Afrofuturistic elements, merging traumas of the past with technologies of the future by including a robot in the painting’s right corner. Furthermore, this Afro-bot holds a religious significance, as its arms are held in a crucifixion-like stance. With Xs on its eyes, the robot’s troubled expression and sacrificial positioning symbolizes the death of freedom during an apocalyptic era.
The robot sadly watches as two creatures, who have been stripped of detail and humanizing features, are forcefully driven into a white and painful future. This future is driven by an overseeing, police offer type figure. With a hammer in hand, the authoritative figure foreshadows the captured creatures’ impending forced labor and the acts of violence that may be committed against

This applies directly to Basquiat’s personal life at the time, as his friend and fellow artist Michael Stewart had recently been beaten to death New York City Transit Authority officers. “It could’ve been me,” he said, when speaking of the incident in an interview (Manatakis). To show this interconnectedness, the robot’s clawed arm reaches out to the enslaved creatures, symbolizing the closeness of ancestral ties, the shared trauma, the overarching influences of technology, and the enduring struggle to be recognized as human. (Long 187).
In addition to abstractly analyzing power structures, Basquiat illustrates ancestral ties through his works portraying Africa and African history. Furthermore, the motherland Africa is the central grounding location for Afrofuturism. The involuntary movement of black people throughout the world caused the untimely loss of this mother, which resulted in a strong longing for reunion, which explains the platforms for of the Pan-African movement and Black Nationalism movement. This longing for Africa explains Basquiat’s artistic inspiration in his untitled 1983 painting of the history of black