# The Annina Nosei Gallery *A Biography of Basquiat* — Legendary Biographies No. 047 - **Subject:** Jean-Michel Basquiat - **Written by:** Andre Toussaint - **Shelf:** Art & Design / Visual Art - **Published:** 2025 - **Extent:** 200 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 200 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **Hardcover:** $24.99 — 6 × 9 in · 200 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90470-033-1) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Rowan Hale (ISBN 979-8-90623-014-0) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/047-the-annina-nosei-gallery.html ## About this book Before he was Basquiat, he was SAMO© — a tag scrawled across the doorways and loading docks of late-seventies Lower Manhattan, half prank, half prophecy. Andre Toussaint begins here, on the cold pavement of a city teetering between bankruptcy and reinvention, and follows the boy from his Brooklyn childhood through the downtown clubs, the borrowed couches, the painted refrigerator doors that would soon hang in museums. Drawing on previously unpublished letters, gallery records, and conversations with the friends, lovers, and rivals who knew him best, Toussaint reconstructs the brief, incandescent life of Jean-Michel Basquiat without flattening him into legend. He is attentive to the textures he moved through: the Haitian cadences of his father's house, the Puerto Rican rhythms of his mother's, the codes of the Lower East Side, the thin air of the art market that lifted him and would not let him rest. What emerges is a portrait of a young Black artist who refused every frame offered to him — graffitist, primitive, prodigy, mascot — and who built, in a handful of years, a body of work that the culture is still learning to read. Toussaint asks what it cost him, and what it gave us. The answer is neither simple nor consoling. ## Contents 1. The Crown 2. Park Slope 3. Gray's Anatomy 4. Matilde 5. City-As-School 6. SAMO© AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO GOD 7. SAMO IS DEAD 8. Times Square 9. Annina 10. Documenta 11. Dos Cabezas 12. 57 Great Jones Street 13. The Collaborations 14. The Mascot 15. Heroin 16. Warhol Dies 17. Riding with Death 18. $110 Million 19. The Market ## Questions **Who is The Annina Nosei Gallery about?** Jean-Michel Basquiat. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Annina Nosei Gallery — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,187 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 63,500 words, 19 chapters, 200 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Andre Toussaint is an academic and writer whose family traces its roots to the Cap-Haïtien plantations of the late eighteenth century. Driven by his family heritage, he teaches history at Brown University and focuses his research on the untold stories of the Atlantic world's revolutionaries. His writing spans both meticulous historical research and creative narrative. In his published work, he explores diverse cultural landscapes, from the art scenes of the late twentieth century in The Annina Nosei Gallery to the deep funeral traditions of Indonesia in Rambu Solo. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he spends his free time restoring vintage sailing boats and volunteering at local historical archives.