Rene Ricard was an American writer, artist, and actor. He was born in 1946 and grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts. After a troubled childhood, he fled to Boston as a teenager, where he came into contact with literary and artistic circles. At the age of eighteen, he moved to New York City and became a central figure in the city's artistic and literary scene. Ricard appeared in several films by
Andy Warhol and continued to act in many independent films throughout his life. In the 1980s, he wrote two major collections of poetry, as well as important essays and articles, some of which were instrumental in launching the careers of artists such as
Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat (about whom he wrote the famous article "The Radiant Child" in
Artforum in 1981). Beginning in the 1990s, he developed a pictorial body of work and exhibited his paintings in various galleries in the UK and the US. He died in New York in 2014.
