In late September, Adrian Wilson and Brian Shevlin co-curated Al Diaz / SAMO© … Selected Multi Media Works, a one-month solo exhibition that appeared at 57 Great Jones Street, luckily available as a temporary pop-up space. This location was once the studio of Al Diaz’s high-school friend, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Beginning with a small selection of photographs from 1978, Al Diaz / SAMO© … Selected Multi Media Works presents some early documentation of Diaz’s 40-year career that started out in New York City with the first-generation graffiti artists.
While still in school, Diaz invented the SAMO© graffiti tag with his classmate in 1977. From then until 1979, Diaz and Jean-Michel Basquiat moved through the rough streets of Manhattan, and its subways, tagging their statements and poems on buildings and walls throughout the general Downtown area. At the time, the authors of the SAMO© writings were anonymous even though Diaz had already been well-known as Bomb1 since 1971. However SAMO© struck a common chord with local residents as a response to the dire economic straights that the city had been experiencing.
