New York EXPLAINED
Get the brief

On this day in New York · August 12, 1988

Basquiat Dies on Great Jones Street

The kid who wrote SAMO on Lower Manhattan walls was dead of an overdose at 27, ten years and a few million dollars later, in the same loft where he once painted alongside Andy Warhol.

The facts

Date
August 12, 1988
Age
27
Where
His loft at 57 Great Jones Street, NoHo, a space he rented from Andy Warhol
Cause
Heroin overdose

Jean-Michel Basquiat was found dead in his loft at 57 Great Jones Street in NoHo on August 12, 1988, killed by a heroin overdose at 27. A decade earlier he had been spray-painting cryptic, half-poetic lines across Lower Manhattan buildings under the tag SAMO with his friend Al Diaz, slogans like SAMO AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO GOD that read like fortune cookies with a grudge. He rose fast after that: youngest artist ever in Germany's Documenta at 21, one of the youngest to hit the Whitney Biennial at 22, and by the mid-1980s he was pulling in $1.4 million a year for paintings that had sold for $200 apiece just a few years before. The Great Jones Street loft itself belonged to Andy Warhol, Basquiat's friend and sometime collaborator, and Warhol's death in February 1987 is widely thought to have deepened the drug use that killed Basquiat eighteen months later.

In their words

The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.

  1. One or two words on a Jean-Michel contain the entire history of graffiti.

    Rene Ricard, "The Radiant Child," Artforum, December 1981

    Source: Wikipedia

  2. He truly created a lifetime of works in ten years.

    Keith Haring, writing in Vogue after Basquiat's death, 1988

    Source: Wikipedia

Why it still matters

Basquiat's death at 27 turned a working artist into a market legend, and the same SAMO tags that once got scrubbed off Lower Manhattan walls now anchor collections at museums that had no room for a young Black painter from Brooklyn a decade earlier.

Sources

Get the day it happened, the day it happens.

Every morning brief ends with this day in New York history, and every day adds a page to this almanac. Free, in your inbox.

Free to start. The unsubscribe link actually works.