Artist Interview: Roger Guenveur Smith on “In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat”

IN HONOR OF JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT has taken the stage here at the NYTW 4th St Theatre, with sold-out audiences and additional performances for its run in the Under the Radar Festival this January. Creator and performer Roger Guenveur Smith took a moment before a stacked two-show day to chat with NYTW Education & Engagement Associate Marty Chandler about the piece, its history, and Basquiat’s legacy.

***

MARTY CHANDLER: I’d love to start at the beginning, to hear about this piece and how you came to make it.

ROGER GUENVEUR SMITH: This piece was born out of a very real friendship that I had with the late Jean-Michel Basquiat. We met in Los Angeles. He was a New Yorker. I was an L.A. guy. I had no idea that he was an ascendant art star. I thought he was just a cool club kid. After we lost Jean, I started trying to find ways of telling this story of friendship. Telling the story of the loss, yes, but also the glory, the high comedy, of our friendship.

There were major retrospectives at the Brooklyn Museum, his hometown museum. And then there was another retrospective of a lot of the same work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. So, for both of those retrospectives, I presented pieces, which were entirely improvised, and built upon the foundation of our friendship and some of the same stories that you hear told here at New York Theatre Workshop in 2026. Along the way, I did pieces in commemoration of his life, for example, on the date that he would have turned 50 years old. We did a piece at Bootleg Theater in Los Angeles. And along the way, stuff started developing aesthetically. At one point, I used Brian Eno music. I used James Brown music. I used a projection of a film by Andy Warhol called Empire as a backdrop for the performance.

But I came to the point where I really felt that it was time to commit myself to write this piece. I dug into the Basquiat archives and really started imagining this as a distinctive, living, proper piece. I engaged my long-time collaborator, Marc Anthony Thompson, to do a score for it. Marc Anthony dug very deeply into Jean-Michel’s archives: he was always working with music. He was also always painting about music. If you look at the body of his work, you will see many, many musical references, not just to people, but to genres. So, we thought that the musical drive of this piece was very important and hopefully has done justice to the spirit of Basquiat. The first time that I presented it was at the Charles Wright Museum in Detroit. I did a crazy thing: I did three nights, and I did three separate solo performances. I started with Frederick Douglas Now. Then the next night I did Otto Frank. Then the next night I did Basquiat. And I didn’t trust myself to be off-book. So, I stood on the stage with my pages in hand, and I did each page, and then I threw the page down, so that at the end of the piece, I’m surrounded by all these papers on the stage.

Eventually I did get off-book, and we did a wonderful run at the Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota. We had another good run in Los Angeles at a new theatre called Outside In, which we inaugurated in November. It was very similar to the setup here. And here we are Under the Radar. I’ve done Under the Radar now four times. So, it feels like home once again: January, New York. We’ve been here before and we’re happy to be here again.

MARTY: What feels special about this performance, particularly being here in the neighborhood where Basquiat walked?

ROGER: I just walked past where he lived and worked and where he died. It’s two blocks from here. And, amazingly, the name of Great Jones Street was just changed to Jean-Michel Basquiat Way, and the sign is up there, and we got a replica sign there in the lobby. Friends of Jean-Michel’s have come and filled the house with a lot of great love and spirit and cheer, and good laughs as well. It’s very special to do the work here, and to be in concert with people like Fab 5 Freddy and Michael Holman, who was part of a band called Gray with Jean-Michel. Both Freddy and Michael have spoken beautifully over the years of upholding the legacy of Jean-Michel, just extraordinarily. They knew Jean from New York, I knew Jean from L.A., so it’s interesting having this mutual spirit from opposite sides of the country. I recently met Jean’s niece Sophia, and her mom is Jean-Michel’s sister; we had a conversation at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles, surrounded by all of this work that he had created in L.A. I was privy to a lot of that work because he very generously invited me into the studio to collaborate with him. I would be doing soliloquies, and he’d be painting the words onto the canvas. It’s been a good journey, and I think there’s lots more to go. But I’m certainly happy to be here, and to be here now.

MARTY: And lastly, what are some things that you hope for the audiences to walk away with, those who get to see the piece or even those who are just hearing about the piece?

ROGER: I’m certainly hoping that that folks will get a glimpse of the man behind the myth. And I think that this piece hopefully gives them an opportunity to do that, and to wrestle with the very muddy legacy of the guy. First off, he’s a member of the 27 Club. He was connected to Andy Warhol. He threw a pie in the face of a grade school principal and was kicked out of school. These notorious factoids have, to a certain extent, defined Jean-Michel, and I’m trying to liberate him for all of those erroneous definitions and simply try to find the brilliant young man at the source of this work who was not only a painter, but also a philosopher, also a poet, and also a musician, a great dancer. So, that’s the challenge, and it’s a good one, it’s a difficult one. I find in the piece the number 36, beyond the number 27. I identify a number of prominent people who pass at the age of 36, and it came back to me, it came back to me, it came back to me: 36. And then, “ah!”: when I wrote it, it was 36 years after his passing.

MARTY: This is all so powerful. Thank you, Roger.

—

IN HONOR OF JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT runs at NYTW as part of the Under the Radar Festival through January 18th, 2026. You can learn more about Basquiat’s life, legacy, and work on his website.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Explore more

Categories: Artist Interviews. Tags: In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Marty Chandler, and Under the Radar.