SAMO and the street: Basquiat and Al Diaz before the gallery paintings

SAMO and the street: Basquiat and Al Diaz before the gallery paintings: introduction

Before Jean-Michel Basquiat became known for paintings in galleries and museums, he and Al Diaz made a collaborative project called SAMO in late-1970s New York. Its short, cryptic statements appeared in public spaces, especially around lower Manhattan. SAMO was an invented voice as well as a name: it let two young makers put pointed language in front of people who had not entered a gallery to see it. Accounts that make the project Basquiat's solitary first step erase Diaz; accounts that treat it as only a publicity stunt miss the work of writing, placing and repeating those statements. The project belongs to the history of street expression and to Basquiat's later use of words, but the connection has to be traced rather than assumed.^[1][2][3]

At a glance. Basquiat and Diaz met at City-as-School, an alternative Manhattan high school. Basquiat developed a fictional SAMO character in a drama and school-writing context, and the two began the public collaboration in 1977–78. Contemporary newspaper attention named the collaborators in December 1978. Their collaboration ended by 1979, after which Basquiat continued other work and sometimes used the SAMO name. This page paraphrases rather than reproduces the protected street texts, and distinguishes the shared project from work made under Basquiat's own name.^[1][2]

Contents

1. Two people, a character and a city
2. What kind of writing was SAMO?
3. Public attention and the end of the collaboration
4. More than one downtown route into art
5. Exhibiting under a name
6. What carried into the studio?
7. How to look back without erasing the collaboration

Two people, a character and a city

The Estate's chronology puts Basquiat's meeting with Diaz at City-as-School after his return to New York in 1976. The Barbican's Boom for Real exhibition guide connects the SAMO character to Basquiat's placement with Family Life Theater and a short story for the school's Basement Blues Press. In this early version, SAMO was a fictional figure associated with a satirical search for a religion. The school context matters because the project began as an experiment with language and role, before the walls of downtown Manhattan made it widely visible. Diaz then became the essential partner in turning the invented voice into a shared street practice.^[1][2]

The Estate describes the two students as friends and collaborators. The Whitney Museum likewise calls SAMO a duo and credits Diaz by name. That agreement is a useful corrective to a familiar compressed biography in which “Basquiat began as a graffiti artist” stands in for a much more specific relationship. Each short street statement reached the public under a common identity, so it is usually unsafe to assign an individual unsignalled sentence to one collaborator. The project's authorship was deliberately collective in its public presentation, even though later interviews and recollections reveal friction about the attention it attracted.^[1][3]

The word SAMO played on a colloquial expression meaning repetition or the weary sense of “the same old” thing. Basquiat and Diaz could use that invented name to speak in a tone at once familiar and estranged. A passer-by did not encounter a conventional signed poem with a page number and biography attached. They encountered an unexpected remark in the path of ordinary movement. Its effect depended on the gap between a recognizable urban wall and an elusive voice that seemed to know something about commerce, belief, art or status while refusing to spell out a single lesson.^[1][2]

The social geography is as important as the signature. The Barbican places much of their activity around SoHo and the Lower East Side, where a growing art world met existing neighbourhoods, nightlife and street cultures. The Estate also records work on a subway line. Such sites brought together different audiences: residents, workers, commuters, gallery visitors and other artists. The choice of location made a statement available outside an admission price or a curatorial invitation. It also placed the work in a contested public environment, not an empty “canvas” waiting for two artists to use it.^[1][2]

What kind of writing was SAMO?

The Barbican describes the street writings as surreal and witty statements rather than the pictorial signatures or elaborate letter forms often used to introduce New York graffiti history. That distinction describes a feature of the work; it should not become a claim that SAMO invented thoughtful graffiti or existed apart from other writers. New York already had rich, varied public-writing cultures. Basquiat and Diaz made one distinct intervention within that landscape, using terse, repeatable language and an invented speaker to engage the people and institutions around them.^[2]

The statements could be read quickly but rarely settled into a simple instruction. They often borrowed the sound of advertising, slogans or moral advice only to make those formats strange. A brand sells recognition by repeating the same sign; SAMO used repetition to build recognition too, while directing attention toward uncertainty about what was being sold or promised. This is an inference from the project's described form and placement, rather than a claim that the collaborators supplied a formal advertising theory. It helps explain why the work felt at home near shops, galleries and transit and why its brief phrases could be remembered by people who only glimpsed them.^[1][2]

The public surface changed the conditions of reading. A paper poem could be held, revisited and preserved by its owner. A street sentence might be encountered once, covered, removed, altered or photographed by someone else. The Barbican records fifty-seven photographs taken by Henry Flynt of the SAMO writings, later grouped as a portfolio. Those photographs are evidence that some marks were seen and preserved, but they are not identical to the experience of coming upon the original wall. They frame a choice of works, locations and moments. The survival of a photographed example does not prove that every SAMO inscription has been catalogued.^[2]

This difference matters for the way SAMO is often presented online. A collage of famous phrases can make the project look like a set of detachable quotations. In place, each inscription entered a real street with existing signs and people. Some readers would have been amused, some irritated, and some unaware of the pair behind the name. The project gained part of its force from this unstable encounter. A later painting can hold words inside an object whose title, owner and dimensions are recorded; the street version could be more fleeting and less securely attributable to a single surviving artifact.^[2][4]

Basquiat's 1985 interview with Becky Johnston and Tamra Davis adds a firsthand account of this instability. He recalled that most of the street writings, including favourites, had disappeared. He also described people removing signs or even pieces of wall bearing SAMO writing and selling them once his paintings had begun to sell. The recollection does not identify or authenticate any present-day fragment; nor does it tell us how every lost inscription vanished. It does show how a work made for a public surface could be detached from its location and turned into a market object after the makers became known.^[7]

In the same exchange Basquiat says he proposed the idea of writing sentences and a basic formula for them, while acknowledging others' variations. Earlier in the interview he names Al Diaz as the friend with whom he made SAMO. These statements give Basquiat's 1985 memory of the project's conception and collaborative form. They should be held alongside Diaz's own recollections and the jointly attributed surviving material, rather than used to declare one person the author of every line on a wall.^[1][2][7]

Public attention and the end of the collaboration

Press attention became part of the project while it was still active. The Barbican documents a September 1978 SoHo Weekly News appeal to discover who made the writings, then a December 1978 Village Voice article that named “Jean” and “Al.” Those are contemporaneous markers, even though the Barbican's narrative of their effect is a later curatorial reconstruction. The Estate places the end of the Basquiat–Diaz collaboration shortly after the Village Voice story, in 1979. The exact emotional cause is harder to establish than the sequence: a shared public voice was being attached to two people, with different expectations of what attention should bring.^[1][2]

Diaz later recalled that Basquiat saw the street project as a vehicle for himself and began to take it over. His recollection is evidence of Diaz's perspective on the rupture, not a reason to overwrite the earlier joint authorship or declare a single motive for either artist. The Barbican connects the break with a public announcement that the SAMO persona had ended and Keith Haring's response at Club 57. It also observes that Basquiat continued to use the name after the collaboration stopped. Those details make the break less like a clean switch from “graffiti” to “painting” and more like a change in relationships, media and authorship within an overlapping scene.^[1][2]

The press story can also be read as a change in audience. An enigmatic name on a wall could attract curiosity precisely because its maker was unknown. A newspaper identification offered biographical facts that the work had not supplied. That did not make the statements newly legible, but it shifted public attention toward the people behind them. This tension between public recognition and the control of one's image would become important in the reception of Basquiat's later career. It is tempting to make every future event a consequence of this early notice; the stronger claim is narrower. The SAMO press helped make the pair visible to a local art audience at a particular moment.^[1][2]

More than one downtown route into art

After the collaboration, Basquiat worked across several formats. The Estate records T-shirts, postcards, drawings and collages, some made with other collaborators. The Barbican gives a particularly concrete account of postcard production with Jennifer Stein: compositions were arranged, colour-copied, mounted, cut and sold in the street. This was a different material operation from a spray-painted inscription, even though both could be encountered outside a gallery. Calling all of it “street art” can hide the differences among a wall, a carried postcard, a photocopy and an exhibited painting.^[1][2]

The same guide describes Basquiat's presence at the Canal Zone loft in 1979, where artists and musicians from different New York scenes met. Its account places him with Fab 5 Freddy, Michael Holman and Stein, among others. The Estate's chronology also records the Canal Street social network, the club scene and his band projects. These details do not mean one downtown network invented Basquiat. They show how informal spaces could connect a writer of public text with people making music, film, photographs, multiples and exhibitions. The city's cultural routes were not a single ladder from the pavement to a gallery.^[1][2]

That point also protects the history of other graffiti artists. The Barbican names writers such as Lee Quiñones and Fab 5 Freddy in its Canal Zone account. Their work and audiences were not interchangeable with SAMO's. Painting a name or image on trains, making a loft mural, selling a postcard and placing an elusive aphorism in SoHo involved different skills, sites and expectations. Basquiat participated in a cross-scene exchange; describing him as the inventor or representative of all graffiti practice would erase the artists and communities already shaping it.^[2]

The Basquiat biography follows his full career chronology, and the artist guide introduces the larger body of work. This page stays with how the collaborative street project worked: who made it, how it used public space, what survived of it and what changed as Basquiat's work entered other formats. It also explains why the earlier phase should not be treated as a mere preface to the valuable paintings that came later.^[1][2]

Exhibiting under a name

Basquiat's movement into group exhibitions was not a single event. The Brooklyn Museum notes his participation in the 1980 Times Square Show. MoMA PS1's archive identifies the 1981 New York/New Wave exhibition as his first museum-context presentation, with work shown under his own name in the archive's retrospective description. That same archive records an easily overlooked contribution: Basquiat hand-lettered all of the exhibition's labels. Writing was thus present in the museum space not only inside his exhibited works but in the language visitors used to navigate the show.^[4][5]

The distinction between a tag and a name is historically useful, though not absolute. Later accounts sometimes use “SAMO” as a shorthand for the young artist in that 1981 exhibition, while MoMA PS1's archive emphasizes the move to his own name. The safest conclusion is that 1981 was a moment of transition in public identification and institutional reception. The archive establishes his label-writing and museum display; it does not make the many earlier collaborative street works into one-person museum objects. An exhibition can bring a person into view without retrospectively changing the authorship of what came before it.^[4][5]

The change in setting altered the audience's expectations. A street statement could address a passer-by who did not know its author. An exhibition label gave a visitor a way to identify a work, perhaps measure it against other art and attach a career to it. Basquiat moved through both forms of public address. His participation in New York/New Wave shows an artist engaging with museum conventions of display even while his hand was literally present in the handwritten labels. It is one reason the transition should be described as an active negotiation of formats, rather than a simple escape from the street.^[5]

What carried into the studio?

The Brooklyn Museum's Unknown Notebooks research treats language as a medium in its own right. Its exhibition account describes handwritten text, pictograms, lists and drawings moving through notebooks and into paintings and drawings. This does not mean a SAMO phrase in public space became the master key to every later canvas. It means Basquiat kept testing what words could do next to images: label a figure, interrupt a picture, invoke a source, repeat a name or make reading difficult. A traced continuity of practice is more useful than the claim that his mature work was simply graffiti enlarged.^[6]

The notebook evidence also complicates the idea of one instantaneous change of style. Brooklyn describes early notebooks with text and imagery developed across pages, including subjects that recur later. The total number of notebooks is unknown. They demonstrate processes of collecting, writing and redrawing, not merely spontaneous marks. The words, anatomy and symbols guide explores those later combinations in specific works. Here the important bridge is medium: a street statement, a notebook page and a canvas can all contain words, yet each asks to be read differently.^[6]

The Whitney's artist account points to the continuing interplay of text and image, abstraction and figuration, historical information and contemporary critique. That summary is broad, but it identifies a practice that outgrew the initial collaborative format. In the Hollywood Africans guide, names and charged words are part of a 1983 studio painting with specific figures and a documented collection history. In the paintings guide, material surfaces and scale become central. SAMO can illuminate why public language remained important without being made responsible for every later subject or material choice.^[3][6]

How to look back without erasing the collaboration

The surviving evidence is uneven. Estate chronology, institutional exhibition guides, contemporary newspaper items cited by those guides, archival photographs and Diaz's later recollection offer different kinds of knowledge. A photograph can document a mark's visible appearance in one moment. A newspaper can date public attention. A retrospective guide can organize a persuasive narrative, but it is written after the events. Diaz's account is indispensable for understanding the partnership and its rupture, and should be identified as his account when it concerns motives. Keeping those evidence types apart makes the project more interesting, rather than less certain for the sake of it.^[1][2]

The most reliable first step is simple: say Basquiat and Al Diaz when describing the shared SAMO project. Then ask what the invented voice did in the place where it appeared. It made a passer-by read in public; it brought an elusive remark into commercial and artistic neighbourhoods; and it circulated without the stable object label that later museums could provide. The project did not have to become a painting to count as substantial work. It helped establish an approach to language and self-presentation whose later forms can be followed, one object at a time, through the rest of Basquiat's career.^[1][2][6]

Frequently Asked Questions

References and further reading

1. Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1970s chronology, City-as-School and Al Diaz, character development, public collaboration, 1978–79 chronology and later formats. Later recollections reproduced there are attributed as such.
2. Barbican, Basquiat: Boom for Real large-print exhibition guide, pp. 8–12, school and street context, newspaper and Henry Flynt documentation, Canal Zone and postcard-making. Its reproductions and quoted street texts are not republished here.
3. Whitney Museum of American Art, Basquiat artist account, credits the SAMO duo and describes later combinations of text, image and social commentary.
4. Brooklyn Museum, One Basquiat press release, notes participation in the 1980 Times Square Show.
5. MoMA PS1, A Bit of Matter: The MoMA PS1 Archives 1976–2000 checklist, p. 6, New York/New Wave archival items and the handwritten-label account.
6. Brooklyn Museum, Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks exhibition account, describes language and text-image practice across notebooks, street work, drawings and paintings.
7. Barbican Centre, 1985 Basquiat interview with Becky Johnston and Tamra Davis, pp. 4 and 16–17, his naming of Al Diaz, account of sentence-making and recollection of removed signs.