In Conversation: Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols

In this episode of Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) In Conversation, Corbin Graves sits with William Córdova, who shares how his artistic journey and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s influence have shaped his practice. Explore the resources below to dive deeper into the conversation.

Further Resources

William Córdova, contemporary cultural practitioner and interdisciplinary artist, provided the resources below, including artist inspirations, digital and print content related to the conversation. The list below explores themes of identity, culture, Peruvian history, as well as early hip-hop and reggaeton music from New York to Panama. We encourage you to read, listen, and enjoy.

Early Visual Artists Influence

Pancho Fierro (1807–1879)—Self-taught Afro-Peruvian watercolorist who chronicled everyday life in Lima with remarkable vitality, depicting tapadas, soldiers, dancers, and street vendors in a style that captured the social fabric of a newly independent nation.
Tilsa Tsuchiya (1928–1984)—Pioneering Peruvian painter of Japanese-Peruvian heritage, renowned for her mytho-surrealist style that fused Quechua mythology, pre-Columbian art, and Eastern philosophy into evocative depictions of Peruvian legends and identity.
Rubem Valentim (1922–1991)—Afro-Brazilian painter and sculptor whose constructivist compositions are built from geometric reductions of Orixás—deities from the Candomblé and Umbanda religions—making him a key bridge between Afro-Brazilian spiritual tradition and modernist abstraction.
Martín Chambi (1891–1973)—One of the first major Indigenous Latin American photographers, known for the technical quality of his work and the dignity with which he represented his Andean subjects, combining documentary sensibility with strong aesthetic composition to create a visual archive of early 20th-century Peru.
Maria Auxiliadora da Silva (1935–1974)—Self-taught Brazilian painter whose bold, thickly textured canvases celebrated Afro-Brazilian community life, religious rites, and the intimacy of Black womanhood, mixing oil paint with her own hair as part of her singular technique.
Syd Mead (1933–2019)—American industrial designer and visual futurist most famous for his concept art on some of cinema’s most visually arresting films, including Blade Runner, Tron, and Aliens, where he rendered “reality ahead of schedule” through his neofuturistic aesthetic.
Fanny Sanín (b. 1938)—Colombian-born geometric abstract painter celebrated for her hard-edge symmetrical compositions filled with flat planes of color, with a methodical process involving numerous preparatory studies and hand-mixed pigments that gives her work a meditative quality.
Purvis Young (1943–2010)—Self-taught Miami painter who depicted the struggles and joys of the city’s poor Black community, working on found materials like abandoned door panels and scrap wood, and was labeled an “outsider artist” whose work entered the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and beyond.
Martin Wong (1946–1999)—Chinese-American painter who settled on New York’s Lower East Side and gave visibility to immigrants, the gay community, and Latinx youth through earthy, painstakingly detailed canvases featuring brick tenements, American Sign Language, and graffiti—while also becoming a pioneering collector and archivist of New York’s graffiti art scene.
Neville Garrick (1950–2023)—Jamaican graphic artist and visual designer most recognized for his award-winning work as art director for Bob Marley, crafting over 100 album covers for legendary reggae artists and designing the iconic stage and lighting concepts that accompanied Marley’s revolutionary 1970s and 1980s tours.
Pedro Bell (1950–2019)—American artist and illustrator best known for his elaborate, psychedelic cover designs for Funkadelic and George Clinton solo albums, creating dense, comedic, Afrofuturist visual worlds featuring aliens, pimps, and cosmic scenarios that defined the visual identity of P-Funk.

Comics

“Before the age of blockbuster films (I was 11 years old)”
X-Men—In particular, Thunderbird, native american superhero. An Apache Native American and Human Mutant, John Proudstar possesses superhuman athletic ability.
Captain Marvel(Marvel Comics)—Many versions. I only read the Black female captain marvel from 1982. Monica Rambeau (Captain Marvel) gained her superpowers after being bombarded by extra-dimensional energy produced by an energy disruptor weapon.
Turok (Gold Key Comics)—Two Native Americans who stumble into an alternative dimension. Pre-Columbian era Native American who, along with his brother, Andar, finds himself lost in an isolated valley populated by dinosaurs.
Micronauts (Marvel Comics)—Moral stories that take place in the microverse. The Micronauts originate in the Microverse, a microscopic universe full of strange planets like the human-inhabited Homeworld which is made up of diverse spherical habitats that are linked together in the fashion of a molecular chain.
Master of Kung Fu (Marvel Comics)—I was interested in alternative ways of empowering myself. The Master of Kung Fu series follows Shang-Chi, the world’s greatest martial artist, who rebelled against his father, the villainous Fu Manchu, to become a hero.
The Human Fly (Marvel Comics, 1977)—“individual without super powers constantly saving humanity from itself.”, A young man of unknown identity who was severely injured during a car crash. After a long hospitalization, including a number of reconstructive surgeries in which much of his skeleton was replaced by steel, he took on the masked identity of the Human Fly.
ROM (Marvel Comics)— Cyborg warrior with human spirit fighting for justice. ROM is a superhero who was originally conceived as a toy and then a magazine lead.

Books Early Reading in Peru and Miami (age 7-18)

Me Gritaron Negra by Victoria Santa Cruz (1978)—A powerful spoken-word poem tracing Santa Cruz’s journey from childhood shame to fierce pride as an Afro-Peruvian woman, transforming the word “negra” from an insult hurled at her on the street into a declaration of beauty and identity. LETRAS
La Casa de Cartón by Martín Adán (1928)—An avant-garde Peruvian novel published when the author was just 20 years old, told through lyrical vignettes of a young man wandering the seaside resort of Barranco outside Lima—plotless, dreamlike, and considered one of the finest examples of Latin American modernism. Goodreads
Road to the Stars by Yuri Gagarin (1961)—The memoir of the first human to travel to space, in which the Soviet cosmonaut recounts his extraordinary journey from a peasant upbringing in rural Russia to orbiting Earth aboard Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961.
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (The Little Red Book) (1964)—One of the most printed books in history, a pocket-sized collection of political statements by Mao Zedong compiled by Lin Biao, distributed to hundreds of millions during China’s Cultural Revolution as a tool of ideological conformity and mass mobilization.
Spacewreck: Ghostships and Derelicts of Space by Stewart Cowley (1979)—A lavishly illustrated science fiction art book built around haunting short stories of abandoned spacecraft—radiation leaks, ghost crews, and derelicts drifting through deep space—set within the Terran Trade Authority universe, with artwork that fired the imaginations of a generation. Goodreads
How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way by Stan Lee and John Buscema (1978)—The definitive instructional guide to comic book art as taught at Marvel, walking through figure drawing, perspective, storytelling, and inking through Buscema’s legendary demonstrations—still the essential primer for aspiring comics artists decades later.
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury (1950)—A linked collection of stories following humanity’s colonization of Mars and the extinction of its ancient civilization, using the premise as a meditation on nostalgia, racism, censorship, and the destructive habits humans carry with them into the cosmos.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley (1965)—One of the most important books of the 20th century, tracing Malcolm X’s transformation from street hustler to Nation of Islam minister to pan-Africanist visionary, completed just before his assassination in 1965.
Expedition to Earth by Arthur C. Clarke (1953)—An early short story collection from Clarke that establishes the themes he’d spend his career exploring — first contact, deep time, technological transcendence, and humanity’s smallness in a vast and indifferent universe.
Living in Reality: Songs Called Poems by John Trudell (1982)—The debut poetry chapbook of the Santee Sioux activist and AIM chairman, written after the devastating loss of his family in a fire; raw, politically charged verse that became the foundation for Trudell’s later career as one of Native America’s most vital poetic voices. The Poetry Foundation
Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur (1987)—The searingly honest memoir of the Black Liberation Army member and former Black Panther who was convicted of murdering a New Jersey state trooper, escaped from prison in 1979, and found asylum in Cuba—a first-person account of race, resistance, and the American carceral system.
Contemporary Music Almanac 1980/81 by Ronald Zalkind (1980)—A comprehensive rock and roll reference covering the artists, labels, charts, and industry of the era, pitched as both browsing fun for fans and an indispensable one-stop resource for music professionals. Amazon
They Came Before Columbus by Ivan Van Sertima (1976)—A controversial and influential work of Afrocentric scholarship arguing that West African peoples made contact with the Americas long before Columbus, drawing on botanical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence to challenge the dominant colonial narrative of discovery.
A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid (1988)—A scorching, unflinching essay about Antigua under colonialism and its tourist economy, in which Kincaid dismantles the comfortable gaze of the Western visitor and forces a reckoning with the poverty, corruption, and erasure that empire leaves behind.

Music

“Hip Hop had many starts” by KRS-ONE—“This is all before there was any scholarship on Hip Hop but much of this material also helped inform and shape the consciousness and direction of many in Hip Hop.”
Miami’s Vicious Bass featuring MC Madness + DJ Lace (1988)—Early fusion of Freestyle and Rap. Madness was Afro-American who went to Westview Middle School. He was a close friend. DJ Lace was Colombian and sampled Freestyle and Salsa. Beasty Boys, Juvenile, Trick Daddy would later sample their music.
Missy Mist—Early Miami Hip Hop artist who was also one of the first students to graduate from New World School of the Arts.
Anquette—Early all female Hip Hop tri with social political tracks like “Janet Reno” and “Throw the P”. Janet Reno was state attourney in Dade County.
RENATO—Early Panamanian pre-Reggeton (1985)
King Posse (Playlist)—Popular mid 1990s Rap Kreyél + Konpa + Merengue in Miami but not a Miami band.
El General—Panamanian pre-Reggeton (1989)
The 2Live Crew C’mon Babe—Most early Rap productions in Miami were a mix of Afro-American + Latinos, West Indians, Haitians; AfroRican, L’Trimm, Young and Restless duo, Vic the Kid.
“Burning Flames” (Calypso)— From Antigua were very common in Miami Beach in the late 1980s and early 1990s in clubs like Washington Square, 5th Street NightClub, The Stephen Talk House. Live eclectic music was very much part of the Miami landscape in the 1980s and 90s.
“The Last Poets featuring Felipe Luciano” (1969 recording)—Luciano, Puerto Rican, was chairman of the Young Lords Party activist organization in NY. He was a poet, activist and founding member of the Last Poets.
“Afrorican“—When Wyndwood was Boricuaville! (1989)

Cinema

“Style Wars” (dir. Tony Silver, 1983)—“Essential document of the New York graffiti scene of the early 1980s.”
“Knights of the City” (dir. Dominic Orlando)—A street-gang leader (Leon Isaac Kennedy) and his buddies rumble with rivals and enter a talent show as rappers.
“Tupac Amaru” (dir. Renaldo Arenas Federico García Hurtado)—Tupac Amaru is a 1984, Peruvian historical drama. The film depicts the life and struggle of legendary Andean warrior Tupac Amaru II, the native leader of a rebellion against the tyrannical spanish colonialism in Peru.
“Tupac: Thug Angel” (dir. Peter Spirer)—Tupac at seventeen, a young man at the edge of his destiny, speaking out about injustice on the streets of Oakland.
“Shooting Star” (dir. Geoff Dunlop, 1990)—“Rare BBC doc containing footage not seen or rarely seen, with insightful interviews [ of Jean-Michel Basquiat] done in 1989 before “the hype.”
“Drylongso” (dir. Cauleen Smith, 1998)—“Definitely the best film on the life of an artist, showing the process of how a young woman develops and channels her passion.” Drylongso follows a woman in a photography class who begins taking pictures of black men out of fear they will soon be extinct.
“Wild Style” (dir. Charlie Ahearn, 1982)—“Features LEE, Rammellzee, Fab-5: Hollywood Africans!!!” South Bronx graffiti artist Zoro is commissioned to paint a backdrop for a hip-hop concert.
“Downtown 81” (dir. Edo Bertoglio, 1981)—Also known as New York Beat. Good historical document featuring JMB, Fab-5, LEE, Kid Creole & the Coconuts before Talking Heads stole their white suit act. Features Basquiat himself, documenting New York’s downtown art and music scene before his rise to fame.