Jean-Michel Basquiat “ENOB,” 1985. Image courtesy of Flickr.

The Brooklyn Museum in New York City announced that it will exhibit eight rarely seen notebooks created by Jean-Michel Basquiat between 1980 and 1987. The volumes, which feature 160 pages brimming with poetry, wordplay, sketches, and personal observations, have never been publicly exhibited. “Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks” will also include thirty paintings, drawings, and mixed-media works drawn from private collections and the artist’s estate.

Basquiat, who rose to fame in the 1980s, is best known for his graffiti-tinged Neo-expressionist and Primitivist works. Drawing inspiration from the street culture of his native New York, Basquiat explored serious topics, including politics, racism, and social hypocrisy, in his work. Brimming with bold, gestural lines and bright colors, his frenetic oeuvre is highly conceptual and powerfully poignant. Although his career was cut short by his sudden death at the age of 27, Basquiat’s influence can still be detected in contemporary art and culture.

Thanks to his street art background, language was an early medium for Basquiat. He often weaved handwritten words throughout his large-scale figurative paintings, creating works that blurred the lines between writing, drawing, and painting. The notebooks featured in the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition emphasize the distinct interplay of text and images in Basquiat’s art and provide unprecedented insight into the importance of writing in his creative process. The notebooks also contain early renderings of Basquiat’s well-known motifs -- teepees, crowns, skeleton-like figures, sneering faces -- that appear in his large-scale paintings and early drawings. Written in black ink in block capital lettering similar to that of Basquiat’s graffiti, the notebooks follow a specific format -- writing on the right-hand pages, leaving the reverse sides blank. The notebooks and several other works in the exhibition come from the collection of Larry Warsh, a New York-based publisher and early collector of Basquiat works, who previously served as a member of the Basquiat authentication committee.

“Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks” will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum from April 3, 2015 through August 23, 2015. The museum has yet to announce the traveling exhibition’s other venues.