A $200 Million Basquiat Heads to Miami, as World Cup Crowds Arrive

MIAMI — This summer, as crowds arrive in Miami for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, another kind of spectacle will unfold behind glass on Biscayne Bay: a 16-foot-wide skull painted in frantic lines of black, blue and red by Jean-Michel Basquiat at the height of his brief career, now believed to be one of the most valuable American artworks in private hands.

Pérez Art Museum Miami will open “Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols” on June 25, 2026, a yearlong exhibition built around the artist’s 1982 canvas commonly known as the skull painting, “Untitled.” The show gathers nine paintings and one sculpture, all on loan from the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection, in what the museum calls its most significant presentation of Basquiat’s work to date in South Florida.

The exhibition arrives at the intersection of global sport, high finance and cultural heritage. It offers South Florida audiences a rare chance to see a painting that sold at auction for $110.5 million in 2017 — then a record price for an American artist — and was later reported to have changed hands privately for nearly twice that amount.

A record-setting painting, rarely seen

Basquiat painted “Untitled” in 1982, at 22 years old, in a downtown Manhattan loft. The work shows a screaming, masklike head hovering against a brilliant blue ground, its cranium split open and ringed with slashes of color and scrawled marks. It has come to symbolize both the intensity of his art and the scale of his posthumous market.

In May 2017, the canvas sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $110.5 million, including fees. At the time, the auction house and art-market analysts said it set a new auction record for an American artwork and the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by a Black artist. The buyer, Japanese billionaire entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa, identified himself publicly and lent the painting to museums in the years that followed.

In 2024, art market reports said Maezawa had quietly sold “Untitled” to hedge fund founder Kenneth C. Griffin in a private transaction for roughly $200 million. Neither party has publicly confirmed the exact price, but the resale placed the painting among a small group of artworks known to have fetched nine-figure sums.

Pérez Art Museum officials say the painting is now part of the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection and will anchor the Miami exhibition.

“Bringing together these works by Jean-Michel Basquiat in Miami at this moment is both inevitable and vital,” Franklin Sirmans, the museum’s director and co-curator of the exhibition, said in a statement announcing the show. He described the presentation as a chance to see Basquiat “not as a market phenomenon or pop icon, but as a rigorous, self-taught master of painting and form” whose work “rewards close, sustained looking.”

Beyond the skull: figures, language and symbols

“Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols” focuses on three recurring elements in the artist’s practice: the human figure, written language and visual iconography. In addition to the 1982 skull, the checklist includes “In Italian” (1983), “Pez Dispenser” (1984), “Untitled (Tenant)” (1982) and a sculpture that the museum describes as showing a “rarely discussed” dimension of his work.

“In Italian,” a dense composition filled with anatomical diagrams, fragmentary text and a centrally placed figure, is described by the museum as operating at once as portrait, linguistic puzzle and autobiographical document. “Pez Dispenser” depicts a dinosaur-headed candy dispenser, a nod to Basquiat’s interest in brand imagery and popular culture. “Untitled (Tenant)” shows a skeletal figure surrounded by numerals and phrases, echoing German Expressionist depictions of the body under strain.

“These works demonstrate how Basquiat constructs meaning,” said Megan Kincaid, curator of the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection and co-curator of the exhibition, in the museum’s announcement. By layering “references, symbols, and language that span from Renaissance anatomy to contemporary advertising,” she said, the artist used humor and critique to examine “mythmaking and power.”

Born in Brooklyn in 1960 to a Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat emerged from the late 1970s New York graffiti scene under the tag SAMO before gaining recognition in the city’s downtown galleries. Over the next decade, he produced a body of work that fused gestural painting, text and imagery drawn from jazz, sports, anatomy, Black history and global politics, before dying of a heroin overdose in 1988 at age 27.

The Miami exhibition, Pérez Art Museum officials say, will serve as an entry point for discussions of race, class, religion and world history, with a particular emphasis on Basquiat’s Caribbean heritage and its resonance in a city shaped by Afro-Caribbean and Latin American migration.

“Miami’s layered histories, diasporic communities, and global outlook provide a context in which Basquiat’s language — rooted in memory, migration, and cultural hybridity — can be experienced with particular depth and immediacy,” the museum said.

Miami, the World Cup and a waterfront museum

The show is timed to coincide with Miami’s turn as a host city for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, part of a broader push by local institutions to position the city as an international cultural capital.

The museum’s building, designed by Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron and opened in 2013 on Biscayne Bay, has helped rebrand the former Miami Art Museum as an anchor for contemporary art of the Americas. The institution, now 41 years old, emphasizes work from Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States and is supported in part by Miami-Dade County, the state of Florida and the city.

Sirmans has a long history with Basquiat’s work, having previously contributed to major exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum. In 2016, Pérez Art Museum hosted “Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks,” a traveling exhibition organized by the Brooklyn Museum that focused on the artist’s handwritten notebooks of poems, lists and sketches.

The 2026 show builds on that earlier project, shifting attention to large-scale paintings and a sculpture in order to make the case for Basquiat as, in Sirmans’ words, “a serious, self-taught master of painting and form,” rather than a figure primarily known through reproductions on apparel and social media.

A billionaire lender and museum power dynamics

All of the works in “Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols” come from the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection, and the exhibition is presented with support from Griffin Catalyst, the billionaire’s civic engagement initiative.

Griffin is the founder and chief executive of Citadel, a global financial firm, and one of the most prominent private collectors of postwar and contemporary art. His holdings have included Basquiat’s “Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump” (1982), which he reportedly acquired in 2020 for more than $100 million, as well as major works by Claude Monet, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Jasper Johns.

He is also a leading donor to American museums and universities. In recent years, he has given $40 million to the Museum of Modern Art in New York to support exhibitions, a $125 million gift to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry that led to the museum’s renaming in his honor, and large contributions to Harvard University and the University of Chicago. According to public disclosures and news reports, he has been a significant contributor to Republican candidates and conservative political groups.

In a statement released by the museum, Griffin said that as Miami prepares to welcome visitors from around the world for the World Cup, Pérez Art Museum “offers an extraordinary opportunity to experience visual art from across the Americas.” He said he was proud to partner with the museum to present some of Basquiat’s most important works to “audiences from Miami and beyond,” and emphasized the artist’s ability to connect across communities and generations.

A spokesperson for Griffin has previously said that most of his collection is on view in museums and other public institutions through loans, an arrangement that allows artworks held as private assets to be exhibited more widely.

The Miami exhibition underscores how dependent many museums have become on such private lenders for access to high-value pieces that they cannot afford to buy. It also highlights debates about the influence of wealthy donors whose business and political activities may not align with the values embodied in the artworks they underwrite.

Public access in a privatized market

When “Untitled” sold at Sotheby’s in 2017, analysts saw the result as evidence of the art market’s appeal to ultra-wealthy buyers seeking both cultural prestige and alternative stores of value. Only a handful of works — including paintings by Pablo Picasso, Leonardo da Vinci and Amedeo Modigliani — had previously surpassed the $100 million mark at auction.

Since then, record-setting deals for top-tier postwar art have increasingly moved into private transactions. Prices are negotiated behind closed doors, and works often disappear from public view for years at a time.

Museum loans, such as the one bringing Griffin’s Basquiats to Miami, are one of the few ways the wider public can encounter artworks whose headlines they may know but whose physical presence they have never experienced.

In describing “Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols,” Pérez Art Museum stresses that it wants to slow down that encounter. The exhibition, the museum says, is designed to encourage “close looking” and “sustained time” with paintings that many visitors may recognize only from reproductions, auction catalogs or fashion collaborations.

The show arrives in a city where questions of ownership, access and inequality are not abstract. Miami’s luxury real estate market and tourism-driven economy have contributed to some of the highest levels of income inequality in the country, even as the city brands itself as a global destination for art and design.

Standing before the skull

For visitors making their way through the museum’s galleries over the next year, those broader debates may feel distant from the experience of standing in front of Basquiat’s skull.

The canvas, streaked with exposed bone and agitated marks, was painted by a young Black artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent in a very different New York. In Miami, it will hang in a waterfront building backed by public funds and private fortunes, briefly on loan from one of the country’s wealthiest financiers as World Cup fans stream through the city outside.

How viewers read it — as an image of vulnerability, rage, virtuosity or simply as the most expensive painting they have ever seen — will depend in part on the stories they bring to it. For a year, at least, those stories will unfold in public. After that, like much of Basquiat’s most coveted work, “Untitled” will return to a private collection, and access to it will again depend on decisions made far from the gallery wall.