Basquiat's Iconography and the Afrofuturist Reading

By Robert Lawrence | Published 2026-07-28 | Updated 2026-08-02

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Painting of a seated Black figure drawn in raw oil stick line on bare canvas, with an indigo wash across the left and gold marks rising past the shoulder.
Painting of a seated Black figure drawn in raw oil stick line on bare canvas, with an indigo wash across the left and gold marks rising past the shoulder.

Jean-Michel Basquiat built a symbol system, the three-pointed crown, crossed-out words, anatomical diagrams, and Black musicians and athletes painted as kings, that critics now read as Afrofuturist, though the term didn't exist until six years after his 1988 death. He never used the word. He couldn't have. Understanding his actual iconography, and being honest about what's his and what's been layered on afterward, matters more than fitting him neatly into a label he never claimed.

I say this as someone who paints in a very different tradition, oil and watercolor, mostly slower and quieter than anything Basquiat made. But his crown shows up in conversations about Black art constantly, often stripped of the specifics that made it mean something. So let's get the specifics right first.

This won't reproduce his work or quote him at length. His estate protects both closely, for good reason. What follows is description and analysis, not reproduction.

Close view of broken gold and indigo oil sticks on a paint smeared studio board, with dried paint ridges and a curling scrap of canvas.

Who was Jean-Michel Basquiat?

Basquiat was born in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in 1960 to a father from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and a mother born in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican parents, and he died of an accidental overdose in 1988 at age 27. According to the Broad museum's artist biography, he grew up trilingual, in English, Spanish, and French, in a household his mother filled with museum visits and art books. That detail matters more than it might seem. Basquiat wasn't an outsider stumbling into fine art. He was a kid who'd been taken to the Brooklyn Museum as a junior member before he ever picked up spray paint.

He didn't stay quiet for long. By his late teens he was already working the streets of downtown Manhattan under a tag that had nothing to do with painting, at least not yet.

What was SAMO, and how did it lead to his painting career?

SAMO was a graffiti tag Basquiat wrote across Lower Manhattan starting in the late 1970s in collaboration with Al Diaz, using cryptic, aphoristic phrases rather than typical graffiti signatures, and it functioned as a kind of anonymous public philosophy before Basquiat's identity behind it became known. SAMO stood for "same old," and the phrases mocked consumer culture, religion, and the art world itself. Once Basquiat's authorship got out, the tag lost its anonymity and, not long after, its purpose. He walked away from it.

What came next moved fast. The Broad's biography notes that critic Rene Ricard's 1981 essay, "The Radiant Child," pushed Basquiat into the gallery world almost overnight, and within a couple of years he was showing internationally and exhibiting at the Whitney Biennial. Few artists have made that jump, from anonymous street tagger to international gallery presence, in under five years. Basquiat did it before he turned 23.

Why did his mother give him a copy of Gray's Anatomy?

Basquiat's mother gave him a copy of the medical textbook Gray's Anatomy in 1968, when he was seven and hospitalized after being hit by a car, an accident that broke his arm and required the removal of his spleen. She wanted him to understand what the doctors were doing to reconstruct his own body, according to accounts from his family. He kept using that book as visual source material for the rest of his career, and you can see it directly in the layered organs, bones, and labeled body parts that recur across paintings like Flesh and Spirit.

It's a strange kind of gift to trace an entire aesthetic back to, a textbook handed to a scared seven-year-old in a hospital bed. But it explains something real about his anatomy imagery. It wasn't shock value. It was closer to a private language he'd been given at the worst possible moment and never put down.

What does the three-pointed crown mean in his paintings?

The crown first appeared in Basquiat's 1981 painting Red Kings with five and four points, and it settled into its now-famous three-point form around Untitled (1982), becoming a mark he placed above boxers, jazz musicians, ancient rulers, and his own self-portraits alike. The subjects he crowned weren't random. He painted crowns over boxer Jack Johnson, over Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, over Hank Aaron and Jesse Owens and Sugar Ray Robinson, figures who'd achieved greatness and, in most cases, been paid, credited, or protected far less than their white contemporaries for it.

That's the argument the crown is making. It's not decoration. It's a corrective, insisting that people the official record treated as entertainers or laborers actually belonged in the category of kings. And he crowned himself too, more than once, which reads less like vanity than like a demand: if the art world wasn't going to grant him legitimacy, he'd paint it onto the canvas himself and let the market catch up.

Why did Basquiat cross out words instead of erasing them?

Basquiat repeatedly crossed out words in his paintings and notebooks rather than deleting them, a technique the Cleveland Museum of Art's analysis of his notebooks describes as drawing more attention to the obscured word, not less, because the strikethrough makes a viewer want to read what's underneath. He wasn't hiding language. He was staging a small tension between concealment and disclosure on every canvas that used it, which fits a broader pattern in his work: text that's legible but interrupted, present but partly blocked, the way a lot of Black history gets handed down incomplete on purpose.

His 1983 painting Hollywood Africans, held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, shows the device at work on a single canvas. It layers his own self-portrait alongside friends Rammellzee and Toxic with crossed-out phrases like "Sugar Cane," "Tobacco," and "Gangsterism," phrases that the Whitney's own catalog entry describes as alluding to the narrow, stereotyped roles available to Black actors in early Hollywood cinema. The painting includes his birth date worked into the composition, tying the historical critique to his own biography in the same frame. It's a good example of how his politics and his autobiography were never really separate registers. He wasn't painting Old Hollywood from a distance. He was painting it as a system he and his friends had grown up inside the long shadow of.

What was Basquiat's collaboration with Andy Warhol?

Basquiat and Warhol produced more than one hundred collaborative canvases together between late 1983 and 1985, typically starting with Warhol tracing a Pop Art symbol or news headline using an overhead projector before Basquiat added his own imagery, text, or figures on top. The Andy Warhol Museum's account of the partnership notes the two worked without much preliminary planning, alternating layers in the same studio, and that the collaboration pushed Warhol back into freehand painting after years spent mostly on mechanical reproduction.

The two showed the work together at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 1985. Critics were unkind to the pairing at the time, some accusing Basquiat of riding Warhol's fame. That reading hasn't aged well. Decades later, museums including the Fondation Louis Vuitton have mounted full retrospectives of the collaboration on its own terms, treating it as a real exchange between two artists working from opposite directions rather than a mentor propping up a protege.

Why did Basquiat sell for 110.5 million dollars in 2017?

Basquiat's 1982 painting Untitled, depicting a skull rendered in black brushstrokes over a blue ground, sold at Sotheby's in May 2017 for 110.5 million dollars to Japanese collector Yusaku Maezawa, making it the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by an American artist. The sale, reported at the time by NPR, took roughly ten minutes of bidding and reportedly drew audible gasps from the room once it blew past estimates.

There's a genuine irony worth sitting with here, one Basquiat's own crown motif practically predicts. A man who spent his career painting Black musicians and athletes who'd been chronically underpaid for their genius became, after his own death, one of the most expensive American artists ever sold, at a price his own community of subjects never got close to seeing in their lifetimes.

Is Basquiat's art actually Afrofuturism?

Basquiat's work is regularly read through an Afrofuturist lens today, but that framing is a label applied after his death, since critic Mark Dery coined the term "Afrofuturism" in an essay called "Black to the Future," published in the 1994 anthology Flame Wars, according to Pratt Institute's Afrofuturism research guide, six years after Basquiat had already died. He never called himself an Afrofuturist. He never encountered the word.

That doesn't make the reading baseless, but it does mean it's a later scholarly lens, not Basquiat's own project. The clearest example of this reading in practice is the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's exhibition "Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation", which ran from October 2020 to July 2021. The show's catalog essay, written by Greg Tate and titled "Hip-Hop's Afrofuturistic Hive Mind", argues that Basquiat's body of work functions as an archive of Black cultural memory built in direct opposition to a Eurocentric gallery system, and situates his imagery, mutant and robotic figures included, alongside the Afrofuturist current running through the hip-hop generation he belonged to. That's a serious, well-supported curatorial argument. It's still an argument made by curators working thirty-some years after the paintings themselves.

The honest version of the story is this: Basquiat painted a griot figure, the West African oral historian and keeper of memory, directly into his own visual vocabulary, work like his 1984 painting Gold Griot, held at the Broad, draws explicitly on that role. He was already working in a register that later Afrofuturist scholarship recognized as its own. He just didn't have, or need, the word for it while he was alive. Giving him credit for the work is different from giving him credit for a term he never used, and both things can be true at once.

Where does that leave a painter today?

Basquiat crowned people the art world refused to crown, and that instinct, take what's been dismissed and paint it as royal, still drives a lot of the strongest work being made in Black speculative and Afrofuturist traditions right now. My own Afrofuturist art works in that same spirit of reclaiming the future as a place where Black figures get to be central, not painted from Basquiat's canvases (nothing here is), but painted in the lineage his crown opened up.

If you want the fuller picture of where that lineage runs, from Sun Ra's cosmic jazz forward, I've laid it out in a longer piece on what Afrofuturism actually is, and a companion piece on the artists shaping Black speculative art today covers the movement well past Basquiat alone. If it's his portrait work specifically that drew you here, the Black queen wall art in our portrait collection sits in similar territory, faces rendered with the same insistence on dignity and presence.

Sources

Robert Lawrence, the painter and founder behind Noirci Studio

Written by Robert Lawrence, painter and founder of Noirci Studio. Raised in Atlanta and trained at Clark Atlanta University, he has painted Black life from memory since 2006. He founded Noirci Studio, establishes its curatorial standards, and continues to make art. Every article is reviewed under our editorial guidelines.

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