Basquiat’s Fall: Al Diaz Brings SAMO to London as the ‘Blue Ribbon’ Paintings Reunite at Princeton

“We were SAMO,” reads one of Al Diaz’s new canvases. “As a riddle we could not care less about brands labels celebrities or diamonds.” Nearly five decades after he and Jean-Michel Basquiat started writing SAMO© on downtown New York walls, Basquiat is about as big a brand as art has. This fall shows both sides of that.

In London, Diaz opened SAMO: TRANSATLANTICATION, his first solo show in the city, at D’Stassi Art on Sept. 25. In New Jersey, the Princeton University Art Museum opened Basquiat, the Blue Ribbon Paintings, and the Art of Reproduction on Oct. 4. And in Hong Kong, Christie’s sold Basquiat’s 1984 painting Ancient Scientist for $9.8 million on Sept. 29, ARTnews reported.

Al Diaz Wants the Record Straight

SAMO has been folded into Basquiat’s myth for decades: an alias, a tag, shorthand for “same old shit.” Diaz, the other half of the project, says that misses the point, and the London show, built around new SAMO© canvases along with his subway-signage series and mixed-media work, is part of his pushback.

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“I’m not going to stand around and listen to a history that you’re part of being told incorrectly,” he told Hypebeast. “I’m not one to sit there quietly.”

His version goes like this. Diaz, a bilingual Puerto Rican kid from a Lower East Side housing project, was writing graffiti by 12, in 1971. He met Basquiat at City-As-School, an alternative high school, and SAMO came about a year later. The word grew out of “same old, same old,” slang from their group of friends, and Basquiat turned it into a fake religion in a story for the school paper, about a man with a kiosk selling religions whose special of the day was SAMO. Then the two made pamphlets of “testimonies” from people who had experienced it.

“People always think that it somehow stands for, or translates to, ‘same old shit,’ but it’s not that,” Diaz said. Diaz has called it “an imaginary product,” a parody of cults that promised to change your life without ever saying how. Diaz says he was the real graffiti writer of the pair and that SAMO was never subway graffiti or a tag in the usual sense, but conceptual writing. He revived it in 2016 because the story had been skewed: “It was something that was 50 percent mine.”

He remembers Basquiat, about a year and a half younger, as soft-spoken, funny and “super, piercingly intelligent.”

The Paintings Built on a Beer Logo

Princeton’s show is the art-history side of the same instinct: Basquiat as a remixer. Its centerpiece is the 11 Blue Ribbon paintings from 1984, built around imagery from the Pabst Blue Ribbon logo and not shown together publicly in more than 30 years, according to the museum’s announcement. More than 60 works in all trace how printmaking, photocopying and silkscreens shaped his painting, with nearly all of his known print projects.

The repetition is the point, and it’s never exact. Basquiat shifts images around, paints over them, changes their colors and sometimes prints the same image twice, slightly out of register, ARTnews wrote. The show goes back to the Xerox postcards he made with Jennifer Stein in the late 1970s and sold outside New York museums, and it hangs real silkscreens next to his 1983 painting Notary so visitors can spot images in both.

“He’s thinking like a printmaker, but he’s not making prints,” Alexandra Foradas, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, told ARTnews. Basquiat put it more simply, in a line ARTnews called a fitting motto for the show: “I collage my own hand.”

What’s Next

Collectors are still paying up, if carefully. Ancient Scientist, a skull-like figure that pulls from African and Oceanic sculpture, mythology, Renaissance art, anatomy and music, per Hypebeast, headlined Christie’s Hong Kong evening sale, part of a season ARTnews described as strong on the surface but masking hurdles in Asia’s art market.

The Blue Ribbon show, curated by Jordana Moore Saggese, runs at Princeton until Jan. 31, 2027, then travels to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Frist Art Museum in Nashville. Diaz, for his part, is still correcting the record. As he told Hypebeast, the history had become a game of “copy-paste information from dubious sources,” and he wants it fixed: “So it was my obligation to clarify it.”