Steptoe has been a fan of Basquiat’s bold work since he was a student. So there’s this emotional, nostalgic connection that I have with him that’s beyond. Those are his times and those are my times. I was there when New York was really grungy-graffiti all over the walls and abandoned buildings, people squatting. “He looked at cartoons, I looked at cartoons-he got images from comic books-he grew up in the beginning of hip hop, I grew up at the beginning of hip hop.

“ kind of comes from where I come from, as an artist,” says Steptoe, who also grew up in Brooklyn.

From Basquiat’s Brooklyn boyhood to his meteoric ascension through the Manhattan art world in the 1980s, Steptoe tells the story in lyric prose and paintings done on scraps of wood scavenged from New York City neighborhoods. Radiant Child is a gorgeous, humanizing portrait of the artist, for young readers ages 6-12. No one is talking about his genius, no one is talking about his humanity.” “There’s this narrative where people speak about Basquiat-he’s primitive, he’s a wild child,” says Javaka Steptoe, the author and illustrator of Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.īut that narrative belies the intention behind the postmodernist painter’s bold, brilliant art, he says: “It’s because of the drugs, it’s because he has a mental illness-it’s everything but him. “Radiant, wild, a genius child” are just some of the words people use to describe Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Radiant Child by Javaka Steptoe