Basquiat, the Blue Ribbon Paintings, and the Art of Reproduction

Jean-Michel Basquiat is embraced as one of the artists who defined the 1980s; this exhibition platforms one of his essential but less-known series—the Blue Ribbon paintings—and his incorporation of reproductive media to understand him in a new and compelling light.

The exhibition examines Jean-Michel Basquiat’s radical engagements with replication and reproductive media, situating his work within postmodern concepts of the 1980s—authorship, appropriation, and the blurred boundaries between original and reproduction. At its center are eleven paintings from 1984, together called the “Blue Ribbon paintings,” works that are dense with layered imagery, including anatomical diagrams, film logos, crowned figures, and textual fragments.

Basquiat, the Blue Ribbon Paintings, and the Art of Reproduction explores Basquiat’s connections with artists including Robert Rauschenberg, and with pioneering Black printmakers such as Bob Blackburn, revealing and celebrating a lineage of Black experimentation and intergenerational exchange in reproductive media. Assembling nearly all of Basquiat’s known print projects, the exhibition focuses a lens on Basquiat as a conceptual artist, probing identity, reproduction, and visibility in an increasingly commercialized art world.