“This project was about using architecture as a device for storytelling – a story that transcends the popular understanding of Basquiat as a rogue urban street artist whose rise to stardom was unprecedented within the art world. It unveils an intimate, interpersonal narrative of a young black man borne into an immigrant black family in Brooklyn who was powerfully influenced by his context.”

The vision for the Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure exhibition—to reclaim the narrative of Basquiat’s life and work and to shed new light on an artist that is only partially understood— aligns deeply with Adjaye Associates’ mission of using design as a storytelling device. The charge was to exhibit his work not as artifacts and objects acquired by collectors, patrons, and institutions, but to see his art as a process by finding moments to contextualize the references and influences that shaped his practice.

The brief required a radical rethinking of the white wall gallery experience to incorporate and develop an immersive environment that showcases not only his celebrated artwork but visual poetics and ephemera from fragments of his original Brooklyn family home to the display of family heirlooms and personal artifacts such as the bike he used to traverse the city, and the sculptures and objects he collected during his travels to Africa. Accordingly, the design was guided by the ambition to develop a sequence of contextual, thematic frames through materiality, tonality, and form that speak to the distinct stages of Basquiat’s life.

To radically rethink the white wall gallery experience for a sustainable traveling exhibition, Adjaye Associates developed a new methodology for exhibition design. One of those methods being the entire exhibit comprises over 52,000 sustainably forested 2×4 kiln-dried spruce-pine-fir lumber and over 200,000 resins impregnated beechwood nails, which laminate the panels rather than adhesives. All stains are waterborne, low in VOC content, and UL Greenguard Gold Certified.

In March 2023, the exhibition was reopened in Los Angeles, California at The Grand LA.