Becoming Javaka Steptoe was no happy accident. The Brooklyn native has spent decades honing his skills as a teacher, artist and author, stacking up awards including two Coretta Scott King awards for his brilliant children’s books. His latest book, Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, is the winner of the 2017 Caldecott Medal.
It didn’t hurt that his father was artist and author John Steptoe, who, when Javaka was a teenager, won a Caldecott Medal in 1987 for his most famous book, Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters. Steptoe gives credit to his parents for his own successful career, but not because his father’s fame gave him a leg-up. It’s because his parents knew how to raise a creative child.
Instead of forging master-apprentice relationship with his accomplished father, Steptoe thinks of his father more as a gentle guide. “He mostly let me come to him with questions if I was struggling,” said Steptoe. “He left it to me to follow whatever path I wanted to follow.”
His father’s biggest gift to him was providing an environment that was full of imagination, exploration, and the basics for all young artists — plenty of paper and crayons. “I didn’t have to grow up with parents who said, ‘So you’re good at art, but what are you really going to do with your life?’” he said.
It’s this kind of permission that Steptoe believes all parents can give to their children, especially children of color who may live in communities where arts are inaccessible or not supported.
“Our art is our voice,” he said, adding that it’s important not only to be consumers of art, but creators as well. “Our art is our proof that we have critical minds and our experiences are valid.”
That’s why he has dedicated his life as a teacher and an artist to cultivating the imagination of all children, particularly children of color. His body of work is a testament to his conviction, including his 1997 debut book, In Daddy’s Arms I Am Tall: African Americans Celebrating Fathers, which earned him a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award and an NAACP Image Award nomination. In 2010 he illustrated the beautiful Jimi: Sounds Like a Rainbow, about the childhood of legendary guitarist Jimi Hendrix. Radiant Child is the vibrant, evocative, childhood tale of Haitian-American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.
In some ways, any book about Basquiat is a book about his youth, since he died of a drug overdose in 1988 when he was only 27. The artist had a meteoric rise to fame in the 1980s, hobnobbing with the New York art elite, including his friend and mentor, Andy Warhol. Back then, his work was selling for upwards of $50,000. In 2017, nearly 30 years after his death, an untitled Basquiat work sold for $110.5 million to a Japanese collector. It was the highest amount ever drawn by an American painter.
That’s the part of Basquiat’s story that many know: The mythic legend of the young, black street artist with natural talent who died tragically. “It saddens and angers me to think of how many young artists of color have discovered Jean-Michel Basquiat, have been moved by his work, only to be told he was a lucky drug addict in the right place at the right time,” said Steptoe at his Caldecott acceptance speech in June 2017.
“Our art is our proof that we have critical minds and our experiences are valid.”.
-Javaka Steptoe
Steptoe pushes against the stereotype of artists who have “native” talent and magically become famous. Instead, he urges readers to think about what it takes to raise a “radiant child.” Like Steptoe, Basquiat was raised in a loving, two-parent family that supported his creative energy. The famous painter spoke fluent French, Spanish and English and he attended private and public schools.
To illustrate this fresh perspective, Steptoe scoured the streets of his native Brooklyn, and, like his subject, painted on found objects, merging his own style with the famous painter’s. As the story progresses, Steptoe’s art includes collage and is intentionally more referential to Basquiat’s work.
“I was interested in the power we all have to shift the narrative,” said the Brooklyn native. “I can go into schools and tell children that I made this book because I wanted the whole world to think differently about this artist. You can do the same thing about anything that’s important to you.”
You can’t read Radiant Child without realizing that the book is as much about the young artist as it is about Basquiat’s mother, a Puerto Rican named Matilde, who played a central role in the painter’s early development. Page after page shows how Matilde sat on the floor with her son to draw, how she exposed him to museums and public art, and how she nursed him back to health after a car accident by giving him a copy of Gray’s Anatomy.
Basquiat was devastated when his mother was institutionalized with severe depression. It’s one more way that Steptoe’s life and Basquiat’s intertwined— Steptoe’s mother succumbed to mental illness when he was 20 years old.
When thinking about how to depict Basquiat’s childhood challenges, Steptoe remembered the advice his father gave him. “My father told me that the sky’s the limit, but there are pitfalls, too,” he said. “You have to learn that not every mistake or challenge is life-ending; you have to make choices.”
That’s why he decided to address mental illness in Radiant Child.
“Children have to learn to deal with difficulty and figure out how to transform that energy into something beautiful,” said Steptoe. “Art does that. You don’t sing the blues to feel bad, you sing it to feel good — to allow yourself to go on and flourish. Pain helps us to get up and have agency so that we’re not suffering. Create a song, paint a painting, make an invention, build a company that cures cancer. We don’t often realize how much pain motivates us to strive for better.”
It’s just one of many lessons he hopes he can impart to readers of Radiant Child – both to the young minds which are inspired by his work, and to the loving parents who will foster them.
Desiree Cooper is a former attorney, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, and author of Know the Mother, a 2017 Michigan Notable Book.