That research took the curatorial team many places, including East 12th Street in Manhattan where, in a sixth-floor walk-up apartment, Alexis Adler has kept many of the albums she remembers listening to with Jean during the months they lived there when they were dating. Mary-Dailey Desmarais, the Montreal Museum of Arts chief curator, recalled the edgy appeal of the artists stomping grounds on the Lower East Side of Manhattan during her own teenage years during that latter decade. The show explores the sounds that shaped Basquiat as he came of age in New York in the 1970s and 80s. The show examines the artists engagement with music, not just as listener or performer, but as the medium through which he tangled with the thematics of the African diaspora and the uniquely American politics of race. Stretching across the museums third floor are more than 100 paintings, drawings and multimedia works by Basquiat along with photographs, sound and film clips and archival documents. The show was organized between the two museums.

The museums also worked with Dieter Buchhart, a frequent collaborator of the Basquiat estate. The show will then travel to the Musée de la Musiques Philharmonie de Paris in France from April 6 through July 30. That connection forms the foundation of Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music, an exhibition showing from Oct. The New York-born-and-bred artist was a regular in the citys nightclubs and music venues and reportedly amassed roughly 3,000 records during his short life, which ended at 27 in 1988. Understanding the art of Jean-Michel depends in part on understanding his lifelong involvement with music literally his working ambient, wrote Robert Farris Thompson in Royalty, Heroism, and the Streets: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat. To fully appreciate Jean-Michel Basquiats art is to understand the outsize role that music played in his life and work.

With paris opera pulls together