August 4

Lads in denim:

 

Lads in plaid:

You gotta have art:

Earth - 1984

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) was a bisexual American artist, musician, and producer of Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage. He first achieved notoriety as part of an informal graffiti group who wrote enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the late 1970s where the hip hop, post-punk and street art movements had coalesced. By the 1980s he was exhibiting his paintings in galleries and museums internationally.
The Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC) held a retrospective of his art in 1992.

Basquiat's art focused on "suggestive dichotomies", such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. He appropriated poetry, drawing, and painting, and married text and image, abstraction, and figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique. (Wikipedia)

In 1996, seven years after the artist's death from a heroin overdose at age 27, a biographical film titled Basquiat was released, directed by Julian Schnabel, with actor Jeffrey Wright playing Basquiat. David Bowie played the part of Andy Warhol. Schnabel was interviewed during the film's script development as a personal acquaintance of Basquiat. Schnabel then purchased the rights to the project, believing that he could make a better film. A 2009 documentary film, Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, directed by Tamra Davis, was first screened as part of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and was shown on the PBS series Independent Lens in 2011.