Remembering Jean-Michel Basquiat and Scrubbing Grime From His Headstone
Beneath a modest headstone at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat continues to draw crowds.
On Thursday, Basquiat was paid a more down-to-earth homage when four French volunteers arrived at his resting place in the southeast corner of the vast Brooklyn cemetery to clean the grime from his granite headstone. The artist died in August 1988 at 27 of a heroin overdose in his East Village apartment and art studio.
The volunteers — three university students and a teacher from Paris, St.-Étienne and Alsace — were part of an exchange program sponsored by Preservation Volunteers.