During the week Manhattan’s art world filled up with Frieze and its blue-chip fairs, a set of rare early Jean-Michel Basquiat works went the other direction, to a small Black-founded gallery on the Brooklyn edge of Bedford-Stuyvesant. That choice, not the art, is the story.
The Bishop Gallery’s show, Our Friend, Jean: Early Works of Jean-Michel Basquiat, sits at 630 Flushing Avenue in the Broadway Triangle, inside the old Pfizer Building. It opened May 16 during New York Art Week, and most of the work comes from the archive of Alexis Adler, the biologist who lived with Basquiat in a 12th Street apartment around 1979 to 1980, when he was a teenager scrawling on walls before he was a brand.
The gallery’s co-founders, Stevenson Dunn Jr. and Erwin John, did not park those pieces in a working-class Black corner of Brooklyn by accident. The show is itself a stop on a longer road: it first ran here in 2019 before touring historically Black colleges and drawing roughly 10,000 visitors, including at Howard and Hampton, an audience the Manhattan circuit rarely puts a Basquiat in front of.
The work is real and well-traveled. The show gathers about 20 works plus photographs and ephemera from the late 1970s, and Adler’s archive is serious enough that the Smithsonian acquired its first-ever Basquiat from her in 2021. This is not a print sale dressed up as a homecoming; it is early, intimate, documentary material about an artist before the auction houses found him.
The quiet argument underneath it is about access. Basquiat is now a name that moves through Christie’s and the penthouses of people who never set foot in the neighborhoods that made him. Putting his earliest work in the Broadway Triangle, walk-in, is a deliberate counter to that, a claim that the people closest to where the art came from should get to stand in front of it without a fair badge or a five-figure ticket.
You can decide for yourself, which is the point. The exhibition is open to the public on Saturdays from noon to 6 p.m. and by appointment on weekdays, and it doubles as the soft launch of the Bishop Arts and Research space. Go look before it moves on, because the next time these pieces surface, they may be behind glass uptown.
Featured image: The Bishop Gallery
