In 1985, influential art dealer Tony Shafrazi organized a show at his gallery featuring collaborative works by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The exhibition, titled "Warhol/Basquiat," showcased pieces that combined Warhol's iconic pop art style with Basquiat's raw and expressive graffiti-inspired work.

The collaboration was a groundbreaking moment in the art world, as it brought together two very different artistic styles and personalities. The show received a mix of reactions from critics and audiences, with some praising the innovative nature of the collaboration and others critiquing the merging of two distinct artistic voices as jarrring.

Their friendship began to deteriorate after the exhibition. Basquiat felt overshadowed by Warhol's fame and the media attention surrounding their collaboration. Warhol, on the other hand, reportedly felt that Basquiat was becoming too dependent on him and was struggling with drug addiction. Warhol's sudden death in 1987 further strained their relationship, as Basquiat mourned the loss of his mentor and friend.

Silkscreen printing is one of the oldest forms of printmaking. The technique, as we know it today, can be traced as far back as the era of Song Dynasty Art in China, around A.D. 960-1279. Japanese artists then turned screen printing into a complex art by developing an intricate process wherein a piece of silk was stretched across a frame to serve as the carrier of hand cut stencils. By the 15th century, silkscreen printing eventually found its way to the west.

For much of the 20th century, this printing method was kept confidential and safeguarded as a “trade secret.” As an artistic form, it appeared for the first time in the United States in the 1930s when a group of artists working with the Federal Art Project experimented with the technique and subsequently formed the National Serigraphic Society. American artists began making "fine art" screen-prints and devised the term "Serigraph" (derived from the combination of two Greek words, seicos, meaning silk, and graphos, meaning writing) to distinguish fine art from commercial screen printing.

In printmaking, each print in an edition is considered an original work of art, not a copy. During the 1960s, silkscreen printing became popular with Pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, who were attracted to its bold areas of flat color. The technique would go on to make up a large percentage of printed garment works. Silkscreen's predilection for bold and graphic designs makes it ideally suited for our graphic exhibition sweatshirts.