Basquiat at the Brant Foundation

I couldn’t get a ticket but the company that we use for storing art during renovations, Crozier, happened to be sponsoring this show. This past weekend they held and a private showing for two hours.

We walked up to the building on East 6th street and asked the female security guard if this was the Basquait exhibit. She asked us who we were there from and we replied Crozier. She nodded her head, opened the door and let us in. It seemed extremely hush hush.

We couldn’t decide what was the most amazing thing about this event. Was it being the only people in large rooms with several Basquiats? Or was it the brilliance of the building in itself?

The building was owned by the artist Walter De Maria from the 1980’s until he died in 2013. Peter Brant bought the building which was originally a substation for Con Edison, and hired the architect Richard Gluckman, to turn the building into 7000 square feet of exhibition space. He kept the original stairs, the original pulley’s that ConEd used to move large objects and the original windows that surround the staircase.

There is a beautiful rooftop that overlooks the city. We could see the apartment we lived in during the late 80’s when the East Village was a very different space. The Liquid Sky generation. I wish I had the money and insight into art then when randomly inexpensive galleries were showing some of the most impactful artists of our times.

The garden downstairs is almost beautiful. We loved walking through the East Village, an area that we know well and spent many years in.

The Basquait show is the inaugural kick off to the Brant foundation’s second home, the first in Greenwich Connecticut. I am looking forward to seeing the shows that they bring to the area. Not sure how Basquait would have felt about the grit of his work and the evolution of the East Village (although still gritty) in this glorious space but I loved it.