The following piece was originally published by UP Magazine.

When Kenny Scharf first became a student at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, he was a bit underwhelmed. He had expected to encounter bleeding-edge audacity and grit from the school, its students and the city itself. Instead he found the place to be little different from what he might have come across back home in LA.

That all changed one day when Scharf met another young artist, one whose intensity and outsider edge stood out among the many flavorless students at SVA. Jean-Michel Basquiat, who at the time was already making a name for himself in the downtown art world through his graffiti partnership SAMO©, took to Scharf immediately, issuing a bold prediction about his new friend’s potential as an artist.

”I walked into the cafeteria and there he was. There was Jean, he was 17, I’m 19. He just kinda looked at me and my first reaction was, like, who is this guy?…He had this intensity about him,” Scharf said during a panel discussion organized last year by the Basquiat estate. Opening his black, zippered portfolio, Scharf offered the future neo-expressionist virtuoso a look at one of his paintings. “And he says, you’re gonna be famous. And I was like ‘what?’ What a thing to say to someone you just met.”

From there the two became fast friends, Scharf introducing Basquiat to another up-and-comer, Keith Haring. Together the three would form the vanguard of one of the 20th century’s most fertile art scenes, turning Manhattan’s down-and-out East Village into the epicenter of new wave style, street art chutzpah, and heedless creativity. It’s difficult to overstate the importance of the art movement that flourished in the shunned and sequestered neighborhoods of lower Manhattan during the early 1980s, except to say that a new era in contemporary art was born in a cosmic flash and it is still influencing the art world today.

Scharf is the only surviving member of what he once called the “Three Musketeers” of the 1980s downtown scene. Basquiat died of a drug overdose at 27 in 1988 and Haring succumbed to AIDS-related complications at 31 in 1990. And though he has long since quit the Lower East Side, Scharf’s legacy there is being revisited in a new show now open at Totah Gallery, a major retrospective that opens in November at the Brant Foundation, and the November opening of Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, the art amusement park that features rides and attractions created by Scharf, Basquiat, Haring, Salvador Dalí, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein and others at The Shed in Hudson Yards.

At the time the trio came together, Basquiat and his partner Al Diaz had already drawn art world attention by melding fine art ambitions with advocacy and graffiti, bedighting the streets and alleys of lower Manhattan with words of wisdom attributed to SAMO©. And it was Basquiat who first introduced Scharf to the graf life.

“He always had his marker and we were walking around and he did the SAMO© and he handed it to me and I‘m like what am I gonna do? So I drew a TV set and wrote ‘the Jetsons’ in it,” Scharf said, referring to the classic 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon series that was an important inspiration for Sharf over his career. In fact, the coming Brant exhibition includes a 1981 piece called Destination Fun that features the Jetson family zipping through space in solo flying saucers.

It was later that Scharf became acquainted with uptown graf writers and took his art below the streets: ““I actually ended up meeting all the graffiti kids and going down and painting the subways. I think I’m the only Jewish white boy to paint the subways in NYC,” he said.

Forty-five years after the downtown triumvirate came together, the historical importance of the work of Basquiat and Haring can hardly be questioned. Scharf, meanwhile, is approaching that status with works featured in major museums and galleries around the world and paintings that routinely fetch six figures. His current show at Totah reveals an artist whose work continues to mature but who has remained true to the artistic values and playful style he honed in lower Manhattan so long ago.

“This is exactly where he was with Basquiat and Keith Haring back in the day,” said David Totah, whose Totah Gallery is currently hosting Scharf’s latest LES incarnationMYTHOLOGEEZ. Totah is located just around the corner from the Norfolk street site of one of the last Scharf murals to survive in the wild. The piece was defaced this summer by next-generation graf artists, but that is and has always been the state of play in the street art world.

The works on offer at Totah were mostly painted this year, but they all are done in Sharf’s signature style, masterworks of space-age surrealism, with smiling blob figures racing about, or engaging with viewers from psychedelic netherworlds and swirling, tie-dyed universes. Like all of Scarf’s oeuvre, these new works absolutely refuse to stand still.

Several of the works, like Fuzzy Blobz and Hairy Blobz, both oil and acrylic on linen, suggest an evolution in Scharf’s work. Both feature maelstroms of red and blue blob creatures dashing here and there, but, as their titles suggest, the sleek, sinuous geometry normally associated with Scharf’s work gives way to softer, more organic, feathered lines and contours.

In a rare venture into the realm of American politics, L R L R, features elongated, speeding blob figures racing in opposite directions, red ones heading to the right, blue to the left, obviously. But the eyes and the mouths of each are invested with little figures of the opposite color, suggesting the possibility that there may be some hope for shared direction amid today’s rank partisan divisions.

As a further homage to the 80’s scene, Scharf transformed the basement of the gallery into an immersive black-light and day-glo Cosmic Cavern like those he created at countless locations over the years, from the loft he shared on 39th Street with Haring, to the essential avant-garde EV art showplace Fun Gallery, to the Whitney and MoMA.

Meanwhile, the show at Brant will assemble 70 paintings, sculptures and objects from Scharf’s expansive career, beginning with work created in the 1970s when the artist was plying his trade on the streets and in the galleries that existed within blocks of the Brant Foundation’s East Village location.

Among them: his seminal 1984 painting, When the Worlds Collide (1984), which was included in the 1985 Whitney Biennial. The work is a worthy example of the artist’s still maturing style with a smiling bright red protagonist with a planetary landscape in his mouth and a waterfall flowing over his left shoulder. It is vintage Scharf in its fearless mix of surrealist figuration and neo-expressionist soundings as smiling, friendly faces interact boldly with spinning black balls, swirling tornados, pink clouds and patches of darkness.

“This painting is my idea of showing how everything exists at the same time. There’s peace; there’s chaos…everything exists all together,” he said. In it, Scharf offered a nod to his friend Haring, positioning a stylized Haring-esque radiant baby in the painting’s lower left.

Surfing the wake of the Brant exhibition, Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy is a vibrant revival of a long-lost treasure trove of 20th-century art that opens in November at The Shed, the remarkably cool art and entertainment venue in the otherwise dreary Westside commercial and residential development known as Hudson Yards. The installation consists of amusement park attractions as imagined by some of contemporary art’s greatest practitioners.

Originally conceived by artist André Heller, Luna Luna debuted in 1987 in Hamburg, Germany, as an avant-garde fairground, a sort of pop art Disneyland that would travel the world. That never happened and the priceless collection vanished into obscurity, stored away in Texas for 36 years.

Unearthed, revived and reinvigorated, Luna Luna captivated audiences in Los Angeles beginning last December and now brings its riotous charm to New York City. The reimagined boardwalk attractions include Sharf’s swing ride, Basquiat’s ferris wheel and Haring’s merry-go-round.

Scharf’s current show MYTHOLOGEEZ runs at Totah Gallery, 183 Stanton St., through Nov. 9. The Brant Foundation show runs from Nov. 13 through Feb. 28 at its East Village location, 421 East 6th St. Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy runs from Nov. 20 through Jan. 5 at The Shed, 545 W 30th St.