Tamra davis interview with basquiat untitled 1982

Some of the largest crowds at the Jean- Michel Basquiat retrospective at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art can be found in the museum’s basement reading room viewing Tamra Davis’s previously unreleased interview A Conversationwith Jean-Michel Basquiat.

The twenty- minute video is mesmerizing. Basquiat
is charismatic, intelligent, and coy as he speaks on such issues as his childhood, feelings of alienation, and current art world success.

Jean-Michel Basquiat's sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, met with filmmaker Tamra Davis, art dealer Larry Gagosian, and author and.

Tamra Davis was a film student at Los Angeles City College and a gallery assistant who filmed interviews with Jean-Michel during this time.

On the occasion of Sotheby's upcoming sale of Jean-Michel Basquiat's extraordinary Untitled, , filmmaker Tamra Davis reflects on her.

By , at the age of twenty-one, Basquiat had solo exhibitions Interview by Henry Geldzahler Interview by Becky Johnston and Tamra Davis

In an interview with writers Tamra Davis and Becky Johnston in the mid-'80s, Basquiat explained the motivations behind his work as SAMO.

Yet, when one listens closely to the interview, Basquiat deliberately obfuscates and exaggerates. As the artist admits at the outset of the interview, “I don’t think its good to be honest in interviews. It is better to lie.” It is with such candor that Basquiat proves to be both more and less than his myth.

The works in the retrospective, and their installation at MOCA, bears this out.

The prominence of the Basquiat myth can lead to overly biographical readings of the artist’s work. Much scholarship on the artist revolves around Ba