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40 Top Art Events of the Downtown Era: A Timeline, 1974–1992

The Downtown Era began in the 1970s, when aspiring artists of the baby-boomer generation arrived in New York. Over the next two decades, they would radically change the art world, opening it up to new forms of media, new modes of exhibiting art, and new social perspectives.

Vrej Baghoomian, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Signed Exhibition Invitation, April – June 1988

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Offset print, 6″ x 9″ (folded); 10 1/2″ x 9″ (open)

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s exhibition at Vrej Baghoomian would be the artist’s last before his death several months later—a death that seems almost foreshadowed by the announcement’s austere design, colorless palette, and solemn portrait photograph. The absence, on the invitation, of any of Basquiat’s work reflects his outsize celebrity stature, as abetted by his savvy use of the media. In the photo, he clutches the copy of Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans that he kept in his suitcase wherever he went, and which fueled his late literary aspirations.