Jean-Michel Basquiat (French pronunciation: ​[ʒɑ̃ miˈʃɛl baskija]; December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was an American artist. He first achieved notoriety as part of SAMO, an informal graffiti duo 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 neo-expressionist paintings in galleries and museums internationally. The Whitney Museum of American Art 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.

Basquiat used social commentary in his paintings as a "springboard to deeper truths about the individual", as well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism, while his poetics were acutely political and direct in their criticism of colonialism and support for class struggle. He died of a heroin overdose at his art studio at age 27.

Jean-Michel is a French masculine given name. It may refer to :

Jean Michel may refer to:

Jean Michel was a French dramatic poet of the fifteenth century known for revising and enlarging the passion play "the Mystery of the Passion" (French title Le mystère de la passion) by Arnoul Gréban. There are three Michels mentioned in connection with this work. There is Bishop Jean Michel of Angers (died 1447), a "Maistre Jehan Michel" who was first physician of King Charles VIII (died 1495), and the physician to the dauphin, son of Charles VIII (died 1501). The bishop is considered the least likely candididate for being the poet, having died too early, while the physician to the dauphin is the most likely, due to the latter also being associated with Angers, and the work being produced for the first time in its new shape at Angers in 1486.

Besides his contributions to Gréban's Passion, Jean Michel composed another mystery, a Resurrection, which was played at Angers on the occasion of King René's visit to that city. Jean Michel has not the dryness of his predecessor; on the other hand he lacks his accuracy. He incorporates into his mysteries the most extravagant legends and the fantastic information found in the apocryphal writers. He delights in pictures of low city life in the fifteenth century, and his language is often realistic in the extreme.