Al Diaz wants to set the record straight on how he and Jean-Michel Basquiat revolutionized graffiti

Al Diaz has always loved to mix visual art and the written word. It's a love that goes all the way back to 1971, when he was just 12 years old, growing up on New York City's Lower East Side. He saw the stylized graffiti that was starting to take over the city's subway trains — most of it coming from artists based in Washington Heights, on the other end of Manhattan — and he knew he wanted to be a part of it.

"The cats that were doing it uptown in Washington Heights, they had a certain swag," he says. "They had a style that was very different from anything that I was familiar with in the Lower East Side. When you're 12, you want an identity. And that was it. I was like, 'These dudes are cool. I want to be one of those guys.'"

He started writing using the name "BOMB ONE" — "Bomb" because he used to freak out and blow up, "One" because he was the first person to use the moniker. But by the time he hit his late teens, Diaz was starting to feel like he was over graffiti. To him, the whole thing had gotten a little "pedestrian."

"Too many people were doing it," he says. "It didn't have that spirit anymore…  I'd been involved in it for six, seven years right? As a kid, six or seven years… is a big chunk of your life."

It was around that time that he met Jean-Michel Basquiat at an alternative school for kids who'd had trouble in their regular programs. The two became fast friends. One of the things they bonded over was a shared love of language. The idea for their shared tag, "SAMO©," came as a result of a short story Basquiat wrote for their school newspaper.

"We had been messing around with the phrase 'same old, same old,' or 'same old thing,'" says Diaz. "He writes this thing about a guy who has a kiosk selling religions — which was a pretty out there concept, but it was very funny — he had a special of the day, and he named it 'Samo.'"

That story became the basis for Diaz and Basquiat's collaborative art project. Diaz explains that, in addition to the "name and number" style of graffiti that he was doing, there was a lot of religious graffiti around New York in the late 1970s.

"'JESUS SAVES'" was a big one," he says. "'PRAY' was a very popular graffiti that was everywhere. So it was kind of a spoof and then it grew from there. Jean-Michel, the whole graffiti thing to him was a little too meatball, you know? It was too much following the pack. And he certainly was not that guy. But this was different."

Over 1978 and 1979, SAMO©, with the copyright symbol attached, became ubiquitous in the city, with messages like "SAMO© SAVES IDIOTS AND GONZOIDS" "SAMO©...4 MASS MEDIA MINDWASH," "SAMO© AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO GOD,"  "SAMO©...4 THE SO-CALLED AVANT-GARDE" "SAMO AS AN ALTERNATIVE 2 PLAYING ART WITH THE 'RADICAL CHIC' SECT ON DADDY'S $ FUNDS." The project was written about in the Village Voice and photographed by artist Henry Flynt, and helped launch Basquiat to his later fame.

While Diaz never hit Basquiat's level of fame, he never stopped creating, and he never stopped being fascinated by the intersection between language and visual art. 

"One of the [reasons] me and Basquiat became friends was that common interest in words and language," he says. "That could be from being bilingual? I don't know. It's important… being able to convey stories, messages."

In 2009, Diaz became fascinated with the "Wet Paint" signs that New York's transit authority, the MTA, uses around their renovation projects. 

"I was like, 'Wow, look at those nice signs that end up in the garbage… I'm going to do something with these,'" he says. "Naturally the first thing I did was I started creating anagrams. You can't do much with one [sign], but you could do a lot with multiple ones."

Eventually — with the "W" pulling double duty as an "M" and the "P" also functioning as a lower-case "d" — Diaz figured out a vocabulary of about 900 words. Then he began cutting up and re-assembling the signs into poetry. 

"Because you only have a few letters, everything becomes a tongue twister," he says. "It's like, 'TEN MEN ENTWINED IN A TIN MINE.' Right? 'TEN MEN ENJOYING ENTERTAINMENT.'"

Gradually, Diaz expanded his vocabulary by using bits from other subway signs.

"I would add symbols, like the 'turn around' U, and no entry, the red dot as an 'O.' So I had a little more of an alphabet, but it was still a constrained alphabet," he says. "So what happens is it becomes like a thesaurus and you start working with the language and to find ways of saying things."

"There was one time I wanted to write 'The shit hits the fan' and I couldn't, I didn't have the letters for it. I didn't have an 'H.' I wrote a 'fecal matter slams into an electric fan.' Now I have an H, but anyway, that was the challenge. It's like a one-legged race."

In 2016, Diaz resurrected the SAMO© tag. He says he did it in part both because he was frustrated by the number of people who thought SAMO© was just Basquiat, and the ways in which his late partner's legacy was being co-opted. 

"SAMO© was not Jean-Michel's nickname," he says. "It was our product. It was not a person. It was a product that we were trying to sell — an experiment in hype."

Diaz was particularly bothered by Tiffany's 2021 publicity campaign, which featured Jay-Z and Beyoncé posing next to Basquiat's  "Equals Pi" — Jay with a hairstyle clearly meant to evoke Basquiat, Beyoncé dressed as Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's. (In an interview with Women's Wear Daily, a spokesperson for the jeweller claimed that the use of "Tiffany Blue" in the painting may have been an homage to the company, something Diaz strenuously denies.)

"It was ridiculous," he says. "All this opulent stuff and trying to somehow work it into the Basquiat narrative… We were just extreme ragamuffins. We couldn't care less about Studio 54 or any of this other bougie stuff. We were just the opposite. We were listening to the Ramones and stuff like that."

Diaz's new show, opening Oct. 29 at Toronto's Cultural Goods Gallery, is also part of what he calls the "ongoing clarification of the SAMO© narrative." It's an expansion on a show he did in New York last year, called "We Were SAMO©."

"It has pieces, actual paintings and three-dimensional objects and panels, that use the [SAMO©] image; the limited images, photos, that I have of me and Jean-Michel during that period; excerpts from the Village Voice article that exposed us as SAMO©," Diaz says. "It has some of my [Wet Paint] texts. I did some large banners that talk about things like The Crown. That was never part of SAMO©. It was Jean-Michel's thing."

Ultimately, Diaz wants to set the record straight not just about SAMO©, but about the early days of New York graffiti as a whole. He's currently working on putting together a retrospective show about the scene, which will take place at Howl Arts in New York in November. 

"This is the birthplace of what has become a global phenomena and we need to celebrate it as a whole culture, not just the top 10 people that you hear about," he says. "[The exhibit] is a lot of work and it's pretty thorough. And I think people should come see it. You could really learn something about the phenomenon that is graffiti culture."

FROM SAMO©… TO SAMO©… EVOLUTION OF STREET: ART & TYPE will run at the Cultural Goods Gallery in Toronto from Oct. 29 to Dec. 17.

Correction: this article initially stated that Diaz began using the SAMO© tag again in 2019. He actually brought the tag back in 2016. We regret the error.