Jean-Michel Basquiat was a Brooklyn born painter who began as a graffiti writer in Lower Manhattan and died on 12 August 1988, aged 27. The fact that surprises people most is how his street career ended: in 1980, the name that had made him known was declared dead on gallery walls, and, by most accounts, he was the one who wrote it.
Before the paintings and the auction records, there was a signature that belonged to no one. Basquiat and a schoolmate, Al Diaz, covered Lower Manhattan with short, puzzling messages signed SAMO, short for same old, and the counterculture press, the Village Voice above all, took notice.
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SAMO was a name, not a person. Nobody knew who stood behind it, and it lived on walls, not in galleries. Then, in 1980, the same walls carried a new sentence: SAMO IS DEAD. It appeared on the facades of several SoHo art galleries and on buildings downtown, exactly where the art world could not miss it.
The sentence read like an obituary for a stranger, but the man who had invented the name seems to have written it himself. Basquiat, by most accounts, put it up after he and Diaz fell out, which makes the loudest announcement of the whole SAMO story the closing of a partnership.
To see why that announcement mattered, you have to start with what SAMO was before anyone declared it dead.
What You'll Discover
What SAMO really was.
The book behind the skulls.
What he sold when homeless.
What happened with Warhol.
What one skull sold for.