Billboard.com recently tagged along with Brooklyn, New York rapper Fabolous as he toured the “Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks” exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum.
In between browsing the exhibit, Fab chopped it up with Billboard.com to share his thoughts on Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work. He spoke on seeing “one-liners” and “punchlines” in the late artist’s notebooks, and Basquiat’s ability to spill out his experiences through his art.
“I see a lot that would have been one-liners or punchlines,” Fabolous said. “Sometimes a lot of the work too feels like spills. Like he absorbed whatever he’s going through or seen, and now he just spills it out from his expression…Some of the pieces that I loved in the Basquiat exhibit was some of the notebooks. They kinda in a funny way gives a background to the art. His instrument changed to, whether it was crayon, whether it was paint, whether it was pens…A little fun fact was that I actually went to art and design high school. That’s where I kind of got introduced to different ranges of art.”
During his tour, Fabolous was joined by a Brooklyn Museum employee who shared some insight on the life of Basquiat.
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“He died at the age of 27,” the woman said. “He dropped out of school and created hundreds of paintings, thousands of drawings. In the late 1970s, he was doing this writing with another collaborator, Al Diaz, under the tag SAMO…He noticed in some of those pages where he’s crossing out words that he said that he would do that so you’d pay more attention to them.”
According to the Brooklyn Museum, the Basquiat exhibit features 160 pages of “rarely seen documents, along with related works on paper and large-scale paintings.” The exhibit will close its doors on August 23, 2015.
