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Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat

Javaka Steptoe

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Sep 27, 2018 Cecelia Elizabeth added it

Radiant Child

by Javaka Steptoe

Winner of the 2017 Caldecott Award

The beautiful cover illustration stood out to me instantly as I was combing through library books. The artist uses bright colors to paint a self portrait of his younger self, using floorboards as his canvas. From the cover, one can assume the story will be about a Black artist. The author depicts the story of Haitian Puerto Rican artist Jean Michel Basquiat; using illustrations and text to convey Basquiat’s artistic development-- ...more

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Feb 18, 2019 Crystal Vandemark rated it really liked it

Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat

By: Javake Steptoe
Published: 2016

This book stood out to me mainly because of the cover page and how colorful, explosive almost and unorganized it was. I felt it had a story inside the pages and I was right. This book is a true story about a young boy who always knew he would be a famous artist one day. It follows him along the years until he is actually an older man but also a famous artist. It tells a story while also showing his ama Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat

By: Javake Steptoe
Published: 2016

This book stood out to me mainly because of the cover page and how colorful, explosive almost and unorganized it was. I felt it had a story inside the pages and I was right. This book is a true story about a young boy who always knew he would be a famous artist one day. It follows him along the years until he is actually an older man but also a famous artist. It tells a story while also showing his amazing artwork along the way, showing how crazy and not within the lines it is but showing that it is still beautiful no matter what.
This book didn’t win just one but three awards. The first being the 2017 Caldecott Medal, as well as the Coretta Scott King Book Award and lastly the Americas Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature. At first I thought this book was about a young African American boy but turns out it is a young Puerto Rican boy, who lives within the US. This is a great book to be used to show students of some tragedies that can be faced along the way in your life but to show to never give up. The pictures dominate over every page, with a few sentences on each so I thought it would be a great book for young readers to be read to because while they are taking in all of the amazing color and art on each page a few sentences could be read to them as well. The book included about two or three different language words, which could have some of the students from that culture feel appreciated and noticed within the classroom. This book shows that everything is beautiful even if it doesn’t fit societies beautiful standards and I thought that could be a great lesson to be taught to the children. I also thought that since this was based on a true story, if it was something to of interest to a student or students within the classroom it could allow them to follow up on the person within the book and see more of his work or more on his story. Lastly, this book has some words throughout it that may require an explanation to some of the students to get a better understanding of what it means, this is a great way of expanding on the children’s vocabulary and teaching them something new.
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Oct 02, 2018 Daniel marked it as to-read

Feb 27, 2019 Lena is currently reading it

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