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Brooklyn's Basquiat: Art from a Native Son

The Brooklyn Museum has become famous for showing some of the very best visual art black America has to offer. Now a new Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition is added to that list.

The famously ambitious painter died in 1988 of a drug overdose. He was only 27, but Basquiat had already become a superstar in the art world. The exhibit is a fitting tribute to a native son -- he was born and raised in Brooklyn, the son of a Haitian-American father and a Puerto Rican-American mother.

Correspondent Farai Chideya found out more about Basquiat from Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehman.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Farai Chideya
Farai Chideya is a multimedia journalist who has worked in print, television, online, and radio. Prior to joining NPR's News & Notes, Chideya hosted Your Call, a daily news and cultural call-in show on San Francisco's KALW 91.7 FM. Chideya has also been a correspondent for ABC News, anchored the prime time program Pure Oxygen on the Oxygen women's channel, and contributed commentaries to CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and BET. She got her start as a researcher and reporter at Newsweek magazine. In 1997 Newsweek named her to its "Century Club" of 100 people to watch.