The Pérez Art Museum Miami announced this week that it will host an exhibition bringing together about 10 works by Jean-Michel Basquiat that are owned by Kenneth C. Griffin, one of the world’s top collectors.
Titled “Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols,” the exhibition will feature nine paintings and one sculpture by the artist and concentrate on his “implementation of classic themes such as portraiture and the figure, script and language, and his conceptual amplification of color, form, and composition,” according to a release.
“Figures, Signs, Symbols” is curated by PAMM director Franklin Sirmans, who was a cocurator of a traveling show on the artist that debuted at the Brooklyn Museum in 2005, and Megan Kincaid, who is the museum’s collection curator. Griffin is providing support to realize the show via his Griffin Catalyst initiative.
“At PAMM, this exhibition feels both inevitable and vital,” Sirmans said in a statement. “Miami’s layered histories, diasporic communities, and global outlook create a context where Basquiat’s visual language—rooted in memory, migration, and cultural hybridity—can be experienced with particular depth and immediacy.”
Among the works that Griffin is loaning to the exhibition, which opens June 25, is Untitled (1982), which set Basquiat’s current auction record when it sold for $110.5 million at Sotheby’s in May 2017. Griffin, however, was not the buyer of the work at the time. The canvas was purchased by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who had purchased another 1982 Basquiat painting, Untitled (Devil), for $57.3 million the year before. Maezawa sold the painting to Griffin in 2024, reportedly for $200 million, according to Artnet News.
In his statement, Sirmans added, “This is a compelling moment to revisit Jean-Michel Basquiat not as a market phenomenon or pop icon, but as a rigorous, self-taught master of painting and form. By bringing together works that are rarely seen in depth, we’re inviting audiences to slow down, to look closely, and to encounter a new way of understanding an artist whose name is universally known but whose complexity still demands deeper study.”
The exhibition will also feature another 1982 painting, Untitled (Tenant), of a “distorted, skeletal figure”; Pez Dispenser (1984), showing the namesake candy contraption; and In Italian (1983), which operates “as portrait, study, linguistic puzzle, and autobiographical document that reflects his engagement with the Italian Renaissance tradition of anatomical investigation,” according to a release.
While a Basquiat exhibition is a blockbuster on its own that is sure to draw in thousands of visitors, PAMM is also hoping to capitalize that visitors in town for some of the World Cup matches will equally make their way to the museum. Miami will host seven of the World Cup matches, including the third-place play-off. (Three of the matches, all in the group stage, will be played prior to the June 25 opening date.)
“As Miami prepares to welcome a global audience for the FIFA World Cup, Pérez Art Museum Miami offers an extraordinary opportunity to experience visual art from across the Americas,” Griffin said in a statement. “I am proud to partner with PAMM to present some of the greatest works by one of America’s most iconic artists, Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose art has a unique power to connect across communities and generations.”
