Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Brooklyn Years Return in “Our Friend, Jean” at The Bishop Gallery
A private archive from Jean-Michel Basquiat’s earliest years is returning to Brooklyn, where it first took shape. “Our Friend, Jean” opens May 16 at The Bishop Gallery during Frieze Week, bringing together 20 works of art, photographs, and other ephemera from the late 1970s, just before Basquiat began his studio practice.
Most of the material comes from Alexis Adler, the biologist and photographer who lived with Basquiat from 1979 to 1980 in the 12th Street apartment she still occupies. Adler has said they “had relations,” though they never dated. What she did preserve was the residue of that year: murals painted on her walls, garments Basquiat altered, and a trove of photographs, writings, postcards, and drawings that now offer an unusually intimate view of his formative period.
Basquiat’s trajectory soon accelerated. After leaving Adler’s apartment, he secured a studio and appeared in the 1980 “Times Square Show,” the downtown exhibition that helped propel him toward wider recognition. The objects Adler kept behind have since become part of a larger art-historical record, tracing the moment before the artist’s name became synonymous with the New York art boom of the 1980s.
The exhibition has already had a long life. It debuted at The Bishop Gallery in 2019, later traveled to six American cities through a tour of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and appeared in versions connected to both Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuitton and Miami Art Week. Some of Adler’s holdings were sold at Christie’s in 2014, while others were included in “Basquiat Before Basquiat: East 12th Street, 1979-1980,” which opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver in 2017.
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture acquired its first Basquiat from Adler in 2021, an untitled work depicting the American Flag, and purchased more than 100 photographs she took of him in 2024. The Bishop Gallery is now developing Bishop Arts & Research Center, with hopes of eventually acquiring the material. For the moment, the gallery is expanding the exhibition with panels, screenings, and guided conversations featuring Adler, Basquiat’s street art partner Al Diaz, and others.
In a market and museum landscape that often privileges the finished masterpiece, “Our Friend, Jean” points to something more fragile and revealing: the social world, domestic space, and improvised exchange from which an artist’s career can emerge.
