Jean-Michel Basquiat is born in Brooklyn to a Haitian father

Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn on 22 December 1960. His father Gérard Basquiat was a Haitian immigrant; his mother Matilde was of Puerto Rican heritage, and the household left him fluent in French, Spanish and English. He first drew notice in the late 1970s as half of the graffiti duo SAMO. He wrote his own birth date into the 1983 painting Hollywood Africans, and the black-hatted figure recurring through his work is widely read as Bawon Samdi.