A sky blue canvas ripped open by an enormous skull.
Teeth bared through visceral slashes of oil and spray-paint.
In 2017, this untitled artwork was auctioned off for over 110 million dollars.
But it’s not the work of some old master.
These strokes of genius belong to 21 year old black Brooklynite Jean-Michel Basquiat – one of America’s most charismatic painters, and currently, its highest sold.
Born in 1960 to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat spent his childhood making art and mischief in Boerum Hill.
While he never attended art school, he learned by wandering through New York galleries, and listening to the music his father gwhite@example.com.
He drew inspiration from unexpected places, scribbling his own versions of cartoons, comic books and biblical scenes on scrap paper from his father’s office.
But it was a medical encyclopedia that arguably exerted the most powerful influence on Basquiat.
When young Jean-Michael was hit by a car, his mother brought a copy of "Grey’s Anatomy" to his hospital bed.
It ignited a lifelong fascination with anatomy that manifested in the skulls, sinew and guts of his later work – which frequently explores both the power and vulnerability of marginalized bodies.
By 17, he launched his first foray into the art world with his friend Al Diaz.
They spray painted cryptic statements and symbols all over Lower Manhattan, signed with the mysterious moniker SAMO.
These humorous, profound, and rebellious declarations were strategically scattered throughout Soho’s art scene.
And after revealing himself as the artist, Basquiat leveraged SAMO’s success to enter the scene himself; selling postcards, playing clubs with his avant-garde band, and boldly seeking out his heroes.
By 21, he’d turned to painting full time.
His process was a sort of calculated improvisation.
Like Beat writers who composed their work by shredding and reassembling scraps of writing, Basquiat used similar cut-up techniques to remix his materials.
When he couldn't afford canvases, he fashioned them out of discarded wood he found on the street.
He used oil stick, crayons, spray paint and pencil and pulled quotes from the menus, comic books and textbooks he kept open on the studio floor.
He kept these sources open on his studio floor, often working on multiple gwhite@example.com.
Pulling in splintered anatomy, reimagined historical scenes, and skulls transplanted from classical still-lives, Basquiat repurposed both present day experiences and art history into an inventive visual language.
He worked as if inserting himself into the legacy of artists he borrowed from, producing collages that were just as much in conversation with art history as they were with each other.
For instance, "Toussaint L’Overture versus Savonarola" and "Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta" offer two distinct visions of Basquiat’s historical and contemporary concerns.
But they echo each other in the details, such as the reappearing head that also resurfaces in "PPCD."
All these pieces form a network that offers physical evidence of Basquiat’s restless and prolific mind.
These chaotic canvases won rapid acclaim and attention.
But despite his increasingly mainstream audience, Basquiat insisted on depicting challenging themes of identity and oppression.
Marginalized figures take center stage, such as prisoners, cooks and janitors.
His obsession with bodies, history, and representation can be found in works evoking the Atlantic slave trade and African history, as well as pieces focusing on contemporary race relations.
In less than a decade, Basquiat made thousands of paintings and drawings- along with sculpture, fragments of poetry and music.
His output accelerated alongside his meteoric rise to fame, but his life and work were cut tragically short when he died from a drug overdose at the age of 27.
After his death, Basquiat’s work only increased in value- but the energy and flair of his pieces have impacted much more than their financial worth.
Today, his influence swirls around us in music, poetry, fashion and film- and his art retains the power to shock, inspire, and get under our skin.
There are 39 million people in the world who are blind.
Eighty percent of them are living in low-income countries such as Kenya, and the absolute majority do not need to be blind.
They are blind from diseases that are either completely curable or preventable.
Knowing this, with my young family, we moved to Kenya.
We secured equipment, funds, vehicles, we trained a team, we set up a hundred clinics throughout the Great Rift Valley to try and understand a single question: why are people going blind, and what can we do?
The challenges were great.
When we got to where we were going, we set up our high-tech equipment.
Power was rarely available.
We'd have to run our equipment from petrol power generators.
And then something occurred to me: There has to be an easier way, because it's the patients who are the most in need of access to eye care who are the least likely to get it.
More people in Kenya, and in sub-Saharan Africa, have access to a mobile phone than they do clean running water.
So we said, could we harness the power of mobile technology to deliver eye care in a new way?
And so we developed Peek, a smartphone [system] that enables community healthcare workers and empowers them to deliver eye care everywhere.
We set about replacing traditional hospital equipment, which is bulky, expensive and fragile, with smartphone apps and hardware that make it possible to test anyone in any language and of any age.
Here we have a demonstration of a three-month-old having their vision accurately tested using an app and an eye tracker.
We've got many trials going on in the community and in schools, and through the lessons that we've learned in the field, we've realized it's extremely important to share the data in non-medical jargon so that people understand what we're examining and what that means to them.
So here, for example, we use our sight sim application, once your vision has been measured, to show carers and teachers what the visual world is like for that person, so they can empathize with them and help them.
Once we've discovered somebody has low vision, the next big challenge is to work out why, and to be able to do that, we need to have access to the inside of the eye.
Traditionally, this requires expensive equipment to examine an area called the retina.
The retina is the single part of the eye that has huge amounts of information about the body and its health.
We've developed 3D-printed, low-cost hardware that comes in at less than five dollars to produce, which can then be clipped onto a smartphone and makes it possible to get views of the back of the eye of a very high quality.
And the beauty is, anybody can do it.
In our trials on over two and half thousand people, the smartphone with the add-on clip is comparable to a camera that is hugely more expensive and hugely more difficult to transport.
When we first moved to Kenya, we went with 150,000 dollars of equipment, a team of 15 people, and that was what was needed to deliver health care.
Now, all that's needed is a single person on a bike with a smartphone.
And it costs just 500 dollars.
The issue of power supply is overcome by harnessing the power of solar.
Our healthcare workers travel with a solar-powered rucksack which keeps the phone charged and backed up.
Now we go to the patient rather than waiting for the patient never to come.
We go to them in their homes and we give them the most comprehensive, high-tech, accurate examination, which can be delivered by anyone with minimal training.
We can link global experts with people in the most rural, difficult-to-reach places that are beyond the end of the road, effectively putting those experts in their homes, allowing us to make diagnoses and make plans for treatment.
Project managers, hospital directors, are able to search on our interface by any parameter they may be interested in.
Here in Nakuru, where I've been living, we can search for people by whatever condition.
Here are people who are blind from a curable condition cataract.
Each red pin depicts somebody who is blind from a disease that is curable and treatable, and they're locatable.
We can use bulk text messaging services to explain that we're coming to arrange a treatment.
What's more, we've learned that this is something that we haven't built just for the community but with the community.
Those blue pins that drop represent elders, or local leaders, that are connected to those people who can ensure that we can find them and arrange treatment.
So for patients like Mama Wangari, who have been blind for over 10 years and never seen her grandchildren, for less than 40 dollars, we can restore her eyesight.
This is something that has to happen.
It's only in statistics that people go blind by the millions.
The reality is everyone goes blind on their own.
But now, they might just be a text message away from help.
(Applause) And now because live demos are always a bad idea, we're going to try a live demo.
(Laughter) So here we have the Peek Vision app.
Okay, and what we're looking at here, this is Sam's optic nerve, which is a direct extension of her brain, so I'm actually looking at her brain as we look there.
We can see all parts of the retina.
It makes it possible to pick up diseases of the eye and of the body that would not be possible without access to the eye, and that clip-on device can be manufactured for just a few dollars, and people can be cured of blindness, and I think it says a lot about us as a human race if we've developed cures and we don't deliver them.
But now we can.
Thank you.
(Applause)