Downtown 81

The last time I saw Jean-Michel Basquiat I was going home from work. As we walked toward each other in the subway, he stopped briefly at the first landing, whipped out a marker and rapidly wrote something on the wall, then went up to the second landing, where two cops emerged from a recess and collared him. I kept going.

Jean Michel Basquiat in Downtown 81 (2000)

Jean Michel Basquiat Basquiat in his apartment in Downtown 81- this served as the production office, a few years later Basquiat would rent out his art studio right across the street- his landlord wa…

“All of the books that talk about Annina Nosei giving Jean-Michel his first studio, that wasn’t actually true.”

Message in a bottle from the 1980s, wandering the streets of New York with Jean-Michel Basquiat. The film Downtown 81 was shot before Basquiat’s big breakthrough, but it was not released until much later.

SAMO is a graffiti tag used on the streets of New York City from 1977 to early 1980. It accompanied short phrases, in turns poetic and sarcastic, mainly painted on the streets of downtown Manhattan. The tag, written with a copyright symbol as "SAMO©", and pronounced Same-Oh[1] has been primarily associated with the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, but was developed mainly as a collaboration between Basquiat and Al Diaz, with help from a few friends.