American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat was BOTD in 1960. Born in New York City to Haitian and Puerto Rican parents, he showed an early interest in art, though his childhood was complicated by his parents’ divorce and his mother’s recurring mental illness. While attending high school in Manhattan, he began spray painting graffiti using the pseudonym “SAMO”, which caught the attention of local media. After a series of successful exhibitions, the support of Andy Warhol and celebrity art dealer Bruno Bischofberger propelled him to international stardom. His idiosyncratic work crossed high and low cultural divides, combining Abstract Expressionist gestures with childlike drawings, graffiti, signs and cartoons, motifs from African, Caribbean, Aztec and Hispanic cultures, with allusions to African-American jazz musicians, sports personalities and writers. As a Black man in a white-dominated cultural industry, his work openly critiqued colonialism, racist power structures and his support for class struggle. He was a fixture of the 1980s New York social scene, befriending Warhol, Keith Haring and Deborah Harry (who featured him in her music video for Heart of Glass). His romantic partners included the then-unknown Madonna, and a number of romantic and sexual relationships with men. As his celebrity grew, he became increasingly dependent on cocaine and heroin, dying of a heroin overdose in 1988, aged 27. He is now considered one of the 20th century’s greatest artists and a pioneer for Black representation in American art. In 2017, his 1982 painting Untitled sold for $110.5 million, becoming one of the most expensive paintings ever purchased. He was played by Jeffrey Wright in the 1996 biopic Basquiat, directed by his friend and fellow artist Julian Schnabel.