When the 17 year old Jean-Michel Basquiat left his father’s home in Brooklyn and moved to Manhattan in 1978, he had nowhere to live. He sometimes slept in Washington Square Park. One way he made money to eat was to sell hand-made postcards, and hand-painted T shirts, on the streets Manhattan.  The postcards were collage, paint and drawings, brought to a copy shop to be color photocopied into cards.  In these postcards we see the transition from his earlier psychedelic style of his high-school comics, and his SAMO graffiti slogans, into the style soon to be made famous in his paintings. They were influenced by modern art (Warhol’s Pop silkscreens,  Rauschenberg’s combines, Dada collage), but just as much by the late 1970s punk style. More on postcards here.

At the time, Basquiat saw the postcards as alternative people’s art, and called some of them “anti-product.” There were other individuals into an alternative art of the street, outside the gallery system, at the time, and in those days it was still possible to barely eek out a living without much money. Sometimes Basquiat collaborated with John Sex (then still at the School of Visual Arts), or friend Jennifer Stein, who’s photo booth picture is collaged, along with Basquiat’s, into one of the compositions.  

He sold his xeroxed cards on the streets or to friends from $1 to $3 each. He mostly sold them sitting on the streets of lower Manhattan: around Washington Square Park and elsewhere in the Village, and on West Broadway in SoHo. You can still find people selling amateur art in these areas today. He also sold them outside the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum uptown, and outside downtown clubs where  punk and “no wave” bands were playing. Jennifer Stein remembers selling cards on the street with him outside the Met, yelling aggressively at passersby to support contemporary artists.

In a previous post, I’ve linked to a story about a Basquiat acquaintance of the time finding and envelop with 18 xeroxed postcards by Basquiat, and being offered thousands of dollars apiece for the cards Jean-Michel would have sold on the street for $1.

It was when Basquiat, still in his shaved and dyed punk haircut, was trying to sell his handmade postcards on the streets of SoHo, that he first saw Andy Warhol. The artist, who Basquiat had admired since high school, was walking into a fashionable restaurant with Henry Geldzahler (then the commissioner of cultural affairs for New York City, and ex-curator for 20th-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art).

The young Basquiat was awestruck and stood outside for almost 15 minutes, working up the nerve to follow them in. Finally, Basquiat walked into the restaurant and up to their table with a handful of his xeroxed works, asking if they wanted to buy any of his artwork, only $1 a card.

Although Geldzahler dismissed the work as “too young,” Warhol found them interesting enough, and bought some for $1. This was the first of many dealings between Basquiat and Warhol, who gave the young artist bits of money and tips on where to sell his sweatshirts when he bumped into him on the street, but tried to avoid him until Basquiat became famous for his paintings. The two eventually became friends, and collaborated on many works in the mid-1980s.

Today, if this happened with Mayor Bloomberg’s commissioner of cultural affairs, he might call for the artist to be arrested for disturbing the peace.

New York City is one of a very few where artists (like those selling newspapers and pamphlets in public) are protected by First Amendment Law. Artists can sell their work on public land such as parks and sidewalks, and not have to buy a permit the way food venders do. This is an accepted practice for NYC artists and has a long tradition, but the legal right was hard won through several lawsuits by artists over the past 40 years.

New York City Street Artists are worried, however, and are warning that “artists are in real danger of losing that right! On Saturday, April 23rd Mayor Bloomberg and the Parks Commission are holding a hearing, the intent of which is to eliminate that right and to get rid of the street artists.”

The Bloomberg administration contends that this is an issue of public safety, congestion and unruliness. But as anyone who has walked through Union Square recently can tell you, the artists with their tables are courteous, self policing and add immeasurably to the pleasure of the area.

The group of NYC Street Artists notes that the city wants to be able to rent space in public parks to corporations for fees of up to $500,000 a year! This is a privatization of public is now illegal. Already blocks of Manhattan that had an alternative or artistic feel in Basquiat’s day (Bleaker Street, West Broadway, the area around Astor Place), has been turned into a virtual mall of chain stores. Bloomberg’s new idea would extend this mall into our public parks. And the corporate clients who bought these spaces would not want to compete with artists, musicians, or political pamphleteers who now use the space for free. Taking away their right to do so is the first step before calling in the police to clear the sidewalks and parks of artists, along with other “undesirables.”

The public hearing on the proposal by Mayor Bloomberg and the Parks Commission is Saturday, April 23^rd, at the Chelsea Recreation Center, 430 West 25th Street in NYC. NYC Street Artists are holding a protest demonstrations outside the hearing at 10am.