The touring exhibition Basquiat was organized by the Brooklyn Museum and sponsored by JPMorgan Chase. It was on view at the Brooklyn Museum from March 11 to June 5, 2005, and then traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, from July 15 to October 9, 2005, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, from November 18, 2005, to February 12, 2006.

This exhibition displayed more than 120 works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose meteoric career coincided with the emergence of the hip-hop movement and who contributed to the revival of painting in the United States before his untimely death at the age of twenty-seven. A number of works in the exhibition had never before been seen in the United States. The most comprehensive reevaluation of the prolific artist's career since a 1992 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, this exhibition included more than seventy paintings and fifty works on paper and was presented on two floors. This presentation celebrated Basquiat's extraordinary achievements—his skillful use of color, his aptitude at drawing, his unique and complex iconography, his integration of text and images, and his development of themes related to the African Diaspora.

The four co-curators of Basquiat were Marc Mayer, Project Director, former Deputy Director for Art, Brooklyn Museum, and now Director of the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal; Fred Hoffman, Ahmanson Curatorial Fellow at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Kellie Jones, Assistant Professor of the History of Art and African American Studies, Yale University; and Franklin Sirmans, an independent writer, editor, and curator based in New York.

The Brooklyn Museum's Education Division, in partnership with the education departments of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, developed this Web site and kiosk based on the Basquiat exhibition. A full-color catalogue containing essays by the co-curators and published by the Brooklyn Museum in association with Merrell is also available in the Brooklyn Museum Shop.