Jean-Michel Basquiat

The crown always has three points. Beneath it, anatomical diagrams, African masks and crossed-out words pile up. Basquiat wrote text and then struck it through, knowing that a word scored out draws more attention. He started at seventeen writing phrases on Manhattan walls under the name SAMO. At twenty-one he was in a gallery; at twenty-three, in an international exhibition. Painting Black athletes and musicians as kings, he asked who gets recorded in history. He collaborated with Andy Warhol and came apart quickly after Warhol's death. He died of an overdose in 1988, aged twenty-seven.