By Javaka Steptoe
The Caldecott-winning story of the boy who saw the world as messy and beautiful and grew up to become the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.
It's the childhood of Jean-Michel Basquiat, a boy in Brooklyn who draws all the time and sees art everywhere, encouraged by a mother who takes him to museums and makes things alongside him. The book is honest that his mother becomes ill and is taken away to a hospital, a real loss he feels, and it follows him as he keeps making art anyway and eventually becomes a famous painter whose work looks 'sloppy, ugly, and sometimes weird, but somehow still beautiful.' Javaka Steptoe painted it on found scraps of wood in Basquiat's own raw, vivid spirit, and it won the Caldecott Medal.
It stretches a biography unit past presidents and scientists into an artist, and past tidy success into a real life with a real wound. The Caldecott-winning art is a lesson on its own, made on scrap wood, so children see that great work doesn't need fancy materials. It's honest that Basquiat's mother struggled with mental illness and that his path wasn't smooth, which makes his story feel true rather than polished, and gives a class a lot to talk about.