LOS ANGELES — The Broad announces Time Decorated: The Musical Influences of Jean-Michel Basquiat, a three-part video series dedicated to the famed New York City artist. The video series includes three segments, Jazz and Bebop, Punk and No Wave, and Bebop to Hip-Hop via Basquiat, where musicians, creatives and scholars discuss the impact of each music genre on Basquiat’s now iconic style. All three segments were filmed at the Broad, in newly installed Basquiat galleries displaying the museum’s uniquely deep representation of the artist’s work.
Home to an unparalleled collection of Basquiat’s art, The Broad seeks to honor his legacy by exploring its musical foundations. For the first time in the museum’s five-year history, all thirteen paintings by Basquiat in the Broad collection will be on view when the museum reopens to the public, including Horn Players, Untitled 1981, and With Strings II. New digital tours and a segment of the series Up Close with The Broad’s Curators will give the public access to the Basquiat installation as well as a deeper look at his works while the museum is currently closed due to COVID-19.
On January 28, The Broad will launch Punk and No Wave, hosted by James Spooner, co-founder of the Afropunk Festival and who ran an underground club on Canal Street in the early ‘90’s. The segment features tunes by James Chance and The Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Basquiat’s band Gray, Liquid Liquid, DNA, and Mars. Following Punk and No Wave comes Bebop to Hip-Hop Via Basquiat, featuring Professor Todd Boyd of USC. He will speak about the through lines from bebop to early hip-hop via use of particular iconography in Basquiat’s paintings and showcase musical pillars such as Public Enemy, Rammellzee, and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.
On January 21st, The Broad launched the first video segment of the series, Jazz and Bebop, which was produced, co-directed and written by Alyssa Lein Smith of Quincy Jones Productions and features LA jazz musician Terrace Martin, as well as input from Quincy Jones himself. Martin delves into how the bebop genre, born in New York City much like Basquiat, played a role in his artistic vision.
Founding Director Joanne Heyler said, “The Broad’s new series, Time Decorated, offers nuanced insights from commentators whose expertise and knowledge in jazz and bebop, hip hop, and afro-punk illuminate music’s bedrock role in Basquiat’s life and art. The series explores the wealth of music references in his paintings, and the themes of justice and resistance inseparable from those references. As the museum with the deepest representation of Basquiat’s work in the United States, the Broad strives to present programming to bring to our audience a clear understanding of his achievements.”
The series includes works by bebop artists such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Max Roach. Music for this segment includes Ornithology by Parker, Hot House by Parker and Gillespie, Ol Man Rebop by Gillespie, and music from Martin’s Dinner Party.
During the temporary closure of the museum due to COVID-19, the Broad has introduced new ways to present its unparalleled collection to the public including Talks & Conversations, Artist Spotlights, and Family Art Workshops. Last fall the museum unveiled L.A. Intersections, a three-part video series, filmed at the Broad, that incorporated music, poetry, and dance into the museum’s galleries. The Broad’s digital programming is available on demand at thebroad.org/fromhome.
James Spooner is a tattoo artist, illustrator, and filmmaker. His graphic novel memoir entitled The HighDesert is slated for release in spring 2022 with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He directed the films White Lies, Black Sheep and the seminal documentary AFRO-PUNK. Both films premiered at national and international film festivals, including Toronto International and The American Black Film Festival, and garnered various awards. James is also the co-founder of the Afropunk Festival, which currently boasts audiences in the hundreds of thousands around the world.
Spooner’s work has been recounted in various publications, including NPR, Vice Magazine, The Village Voice, The New Yorker, Vibe, Fader Magazine, MTV, NBC News, and Variety, and he was a recipient of the ReNew Media Rockefeller Grant. He has been a guest curator for The Broad in Los Angeles and previously programmed for the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Spooner is also a contributor to RazorCake Punk Magazine, and he continues to screen AFRO PUNK at colleges around the country, giving talks on punk and Black identity.
The Broad is a contemporary art museum founded by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. The museum offers free general admission and presents an active program of rotating temporary exhibitions and innovative audience engagement, all within a landmark building designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler. The Broad is home to 2,000 works of art in the Broad collection, which is one of the world’s leading collections of postwar and contemporary art and welcomes more than 900,000 visitors a year.
The 120,000-square-foot building features two floors of gallery space and is the headquarters of The Broad Art Foundation’s worldwide lending library, which has been loaning collection works to museums around the world since 1984.
