Jean-Michel Basquiat. Untitled Notebook Page, 1980-1981; ink on ruled notebook paper; 9 5/8 x 7 5/8 in. Collection of Larry Warsh. Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, all rights reserved. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Courtesy of Sarah DeSantis, Brooklyn Museum.

Moreover, while the notebooks offer—on the surface—a warm welcome into the ecology of Basquiat’s creative practice and lay the foundation for a closeness to the content and character of his work in important ways, these notebooks also resist the accommodation of his practice into the mainstream of canonical white male artists that form the generational parameters of appropriation art and American Neo-Expressionist painting that Basquiat is often associated with (Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, and David Salle, to name a few). Resisting categorization, these notebooks act as testimony to the artist’s pointed critique of the representational politics of the Black artist and his “voice” in Western, Eurocentric culture.

Jean-Michel Basquiat. Untitled Notebook Page, 1980-1981; ink on ruled notebook paper; 9 5/8 x 7 5/8 in. Collection of Larry Warsh. Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, all rights reserved. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Courtesy of Sarah DeSantis, Brooklyn Museum.

While the exhibition does include over thirty paintings, drawings, and mixed-media works—in part to emphasize the fluidity in content and style between notebook and artwork—the impact of Basquiat’s works on canvas pale in comparison when juxtaposed to the powerful present-ness that language enacts on the delicate white sheets of his composition books. Framed and hung like icons across the white walls of the galleries, the simplicity and starkness of Basquiat’s handwriting makes visible his sharp wit and the poetic elegance of his juxtapositions tautly shaped within each written line. Oscillating between the banal organizational structure of a list and the open field of stream-of-consciousness poetics, the found fragments and collaged phrases prick the ear with their subversive meanings, interrupted only by decisive breaks on the clear space of the white page. Popping and snapping in one rhythmic attack after another, Basquiat turns the limits imposed by the even lines of the ruled paper into a score, and allow viewers to explore the text as poem and song simultaneously.

Jean-Michel Basquiat. Untitled Notebook Page, 1980-1981; wax crayon on ruled notebook paper; 9 5/8 x 7 5/8 in. Collection of Larry Warsh. Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, all rights reserved. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Courtesy of Sarah DeSantis, Brooklyn Museum.

Yet it is the substance of the words that gives Basquiat’s formal choices their political power. The manner with which the artist juxtaposes the corporate consumer languages of advanced capitalism (“AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR SODA”) with images of violence to the body (“THE GIANT GORILLA LYING ON THE PAVEMENT,” and the ominously crossed-out line “IN A FRONTAL ATTACK”), and the artist’s own marginalization and exclusion from White America (“THE DREAM WILL NEVER DIE ACCEPT THE REALITY OF LIVING IN THE STATES”) emphasizes the contradictions inherent in Basquiat’s own experience as an outsider working at/for the center of a predominantly White art world. This sense of exploitation echoes uncomfortably in Basquiat’s frequent use of the teepee motif, a reference to Native American culture that points to Basquiat’s identification and solidarity with indigenous communities robbed by Westerners of their profitable land, crops, and knowledge for commercial gains. The artist worked tirelessly to expose the dynamic achievements and traumatic histories of African Americans to a wider audience, and these notebooks give shape to the rage that enacts itself across the span of Basquiat’s visual oeuvre.

Jean-Michel Basquiat. Untitled Notebook (front cover), 1980-1981; mixed media on board; 9 5/8 x 7 5/8 in. Collection of Larry Warsh. Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, all rights reserved. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Courtesy of Sarah DeSantis, Brooklyn Museum.

While the exhibition expanded my understanding of Basquiat’s practice, I left with some doubts about the consequence of exposing the artist’s personal materials to the public. Similar to recent exhibitions of “great” (that is, male and dead) artists of the 20th century, the curatorial impulse to ascribe meaning to ephemera and materials that were often supposed to remain private belies a common institutional strategy to create and promote the idea of an ex post facto singular artistic “voice” that was seamlessly spoken through an artist’s life and art.[1] Especially for Basquiat, whose talent was greedily mined by the art-industrial complex, is this an exhibition that shows the expanse of his intellect and transformative power, or one that merely confirms and underscores the powerful processes of commodification at work in our culture?

Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks is on view at the High Museum of Art through May 29, 2016.

[1] The presentation of unpublished and private materials of an artist is a prominent feature of solo exhibitions and retrospectives, particularly in the recent past. Some problematic examples include the 2007 retrospective of Allan Kaprow’s happenings and performances, Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, at the Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Villa Groce in Genoa, Italy; and the 2001 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, De Kooning: A Retrospective, which presented unfinished paintings and prints by the artist. I am also thinking about more expansive group exhibitions that point to the “archival impulse” at work in contemporary art, such as Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, staged in 2008 at the International Center for Photography by curator Okwui Enwezor, and the 2012 exhibition The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age at 319 Scholes.

Fabian Williams. Gossip, 2014; watercolor on paper; 8 x 10 in. Courtesy of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

In regard to urban planning, sprawl—or the unregulated and uncontained expansion of bodies, buildings, industries, and urban traffic—is often used as a pejorative term. Like many cities, Atlanta struggles to form a stable identity in the aftermath of a series of gentrification booms (beginning in the late 1990s) that disturbed the historically dominant African American demographic with an influx of Hispanic, Asian, and white populations to the city. Paving the way for the demolition of public-housing projects and low-income initiatives that supported the residents of the inner city, Atlanta’s association with aggressive forms of urban growth finds a more utopian expression in this exhibition. Framed as a melting pot of ethnic and creative heterogeneity, Sprawl! equates the overwhelming influx of new inhabitants to the area with the sprawling, spreading, expansive processes of drawing itself.

This sense of connection and community is powerfully explored in Fabian Williams’ tenderly executed work Gossip, an appropriation of Normal Rockwell’s The Gossips (1948), both of which depict a taxonomy of social types or “characters” laughing, talking, and gesticulating. While the figures exude a sense of energy and liveliness that overwhelms the spaces of the other figures, the exaggerated expressions and movements rub uncomfortably against a form of a biting sarcasm that accompanies the history of pencil drawing and caricature. Reminiscent of the sketchbooks of the 18th-century British social satirist and artist William Hogarth, Williams’ work is as joyful as it is disturbing in its exploration of issues of social class, ethnicity, cultural stereotypes, mass technology, and 21st-century life in Atlanta.

Ashley Anderson. Faux Sho, 2012; metallic ink and acrylic on paper, 28 1/2 x 28 in.

Eager to explore the medium-specific boundaries and conventions of what a drawing is and what it can do or achieve, the exhibition opens the gallery space to forms of artistic production that are often marginalized or left unconsidered by institutions concerned with achieving and/or sustaining their commitment to “high art” or art that overtly engages with the modern tradition and conceptualist values. As the financial and corporate center for the Southeast, Atlanta is often overlooked as an international art city due to its position as a commercial center for pop music, hip-hop culture, and media broadcasting.

Caomin Xie. The Broken Other, 2013; graphite on paper; 20 x 26 in. Courtesy of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

Yet it is the clash and collaboration of different communities and regional ways of life that has enriched the city and attracted new residents over the past two decades. For Atlanta, sprawl is not just traffic congestion and renovation projects, but collective forms of engagement and support, as financial and institutional resources continue to grow across the visual- and performing-arts communities. For curator Michael Rooks, the Weiland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the High, it was clear that attention needed to be paid to the rich archive of creative work taking root in the city as well as further afield. Thus, Sprawl! not only maps out the fluctuating contours of Atlanta’s diverse population of creative professionals, but renders visible the newly invigorated dialogue between local artists and the museum. Presented as a long-term initiative to continue to take stock of the landscape and collect Atlanta-based art, this series of exhibitions has been utilized by Brooks as a kind of archival project of interests and genres that are shaping contemporary art and culture within the region. Looking at the rich collection of international artists based in Atlanta and exhibited in this show, such as Caomin Xie and In Kyoung Chun, it is clear that the High wants to expand our understanding of Southern culture in the 21st century. With his appointment as curator in 2010, Rooks is more than just a steward of the High’s collection, but an active participant in the growth of the museum as well as the local art community. With Sprawl!, Rooks reinvigorates the original role of the curator as public servant by grounding his focus and attention in the communities and exhibition-goers that will undoubtedly nudge Atlanta forward as a significant center for meaningful contemporary art.

Sprawl!: Drawing Outside the Lines is on view at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta through October 4, 2015.