Africa Hi-Fi celebrates the life of Basquiat

This Friday at Sonotheteque, the monthly music series Africa Hi-Fi will be celebrating the life of artist Jean Michel Basquiat. In his short life, Jean-Michel Basquiat came to personify the art scene of the 80s, with its merging of youth culture, money, hype, excess, and self-destruction. And then there was the work, which the public image tended to overshadow: paintings and drawings that conjured up marginal urban black culture and black history, as well as the artist's own conflicted sense of identity. He was, all at once it seemed, the ultimate party animal, a wannabe streetkid and grafittist hiding his black Brooklyn middle class roots, an advocate and interpreter of the marginal and dispossessed at the court of the mainstream, an angry black aspirant to the all-white art canon, a precocious talent, a creature of cynical marketing and a fraud, a proto-muIticulturalist, an AMERICAN ORIGINAL. Africa Hi-Fi's "resident Dee-jay selector" Ron Trent will be conducting the tribute all night in conjuction with the International Capoeira Anglola Foundation of Chicago. Doors open at 9pm. Sonotheque is located at 1444 West Chicago