Free. Reservations required (service charge applies).
About Michael Holman
An active player in New York’s exploding art scene of the early 1980s, Holman will share his memories and recount the extraordinary convergence between a defining era and an uncommonly rare artist. Participants will discover Basquiat, the musician, through this discussion covering his musical sensibilities, the musicians who inspired him, his influences and his compositional techniques.
Michael Holman is a musician, writer, painter, theatre producer and filmmaker who formed the historic breakdance crew, The New York City Breakers, created and hosted the first nationally broadcast hip-hop TV show, Graffiti Rock, and co-founded the noise/art band Gray, with artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Making New York his home since 1978, Holman has been an ambassador for and a creative and cultural force within this great city for over four decades.
About Mary-Dailey Desmarais
Chief Curator of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts since 2020, Mary-Dailey Desmarais oversees a multidisciplinary team dedicated to enriching, promulgating and preserving a collection of over 45,000 art works and objects dating from antiquity to the present. She joined the Museum in 2014. Notable among the exhibitions she has curated are How Long Does It Take for One Voice to Reach Another (2021); Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together (2021) and Once Upon a Time... The Western: A New Frontier in Art and Film (2017), whose accompanying catalogue won two awards. She has published widely in scholarly journals, exhibition catalogues, and art magazines on subjects ranging from Impressionism to Global Modern and Contemporary Art. Originally from New York, she holds a Ph.D. in Art History from Yale, an M.A. from Williams College and a B.A. from Stanford.
