A Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition is coming to Montreal next month

The art of Jean-Michel Basquiat will be celebrated next month in an exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music will run from Oct. 15, 2022 to Feb. 10, 2023. The exhibition was initially set to run from October 2021 to February 2022 but was delayed because of the pandemic.

Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music is a co-production with Philharmonie de Paris’s Musée de la Musique. Aside from his physical art, the exhibit will also highlight Basquiat’s career as a musician.

“For Basquiat, music was a message about the transatlantic migration of cultural forms and the brutal reality of being a Black artist facing racism. His engagement with the African diaspora and the politics of race in the United States is one of the main threads of the exhibition. Anchoring the artist’s oeuvre in our time, it considers how his works relate to contemporary culture.”

—Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

This is not the first Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition to make its way to Canada. The Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto mounted a Basquiat exhibition from February to May 2015, which was guest-curated by Dieter Buchhart.

Basquiat is considered one of the most important artists in the neo-expressionism movement. The New York artist was born in 1960 and his work continues to inspire generations that followed. His influence can be seen everywhere from the Brooklyn Nets’ current alternative jerseys to a multitude of Jay-Z lyrics.

This article was originally published on April 28, 2021 and updated on Sept. 19, 2022.

For more on Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, please visit their website.

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