Lane Twitchell's Mementos from Basquiat's Grave

NEW YORK—The Green-Wood Cemetery in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, has a special place in contemporary art as the home of the grave of Jean Michel Basquiat. Brooklyn artist Lane Twitchell visits the site three or four times a year to see what items people have left there to commemorate Basquiat. Fearing the articles will be thrown out or destroyed by the elements, Twitchell saves them for posterity and takes them back to his studio. Included in Twitchell's collection, which he plans to donate to the Brooklyn Museum one day, are highly personal poems, cards, drawings, and letters, as well as random objects like coins and a cactus plant. One exceptional memento is a rock with a handwritten note attached to it by a visitor from Paris, France: “Thank you so much my brother. You stay my star man. Madmi forever. R.I.P.” Other standouts include a clown statuette, a branch with delicate graffiti on it, and a small plastic ballerina. There are also a yellow highlighter, a paintbrush, a pink feather, a green baggie for narcotics, a collection of rocks, a weathered photograph of a painting, and coins of various denominations.

In his own work, Twitchell recycles images from America's and New York City’s uncontrolled development, the fluctuating physical traits of the landscape, and his Mormon upbringing. Twitchell’s process involves cutting and folding paper, adhering it to Plexiglas and painting it, then varnishing it with acrylic polymer and mounting it on another panel to create a luminous layered effect. Stunning and decorative, his mixed media paintings are at once ordered and chaotic, with bursts of color and subtle gradients. They resemble Technicolor cut-paper snowflakes on steroids, and they have grown from their humble beginnings—his earlier works resembled hip doilies—and command your attention with their silhouetted forms and attention to detail. On an even larger scale, Twitchell is in the midst of a public art project for the Emergency Assistance Unit of the Department of Homeless Services, a front line service facility for people who have lost their homes and have nowhere else to turn. His large laser-cut windows will grace the waiting room where small children can wait for upward of 20 hours to be processed into city housing.

Twitchell is represented by Roebling Hall in New York. His traveling exhibition, “Revelation: Lane Twitchell, Drawing & Painting,” curated by Thomas Piché Jr., is on view at the University Art Museum at the University at Albany in Albany, New York, through January 6, 2008. The show originated at the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center in Auburn, New York, and travels next to the Roland Gibson Gallery at the State University of New York in Potsdam.