Jean-Michel Basquiat

One of the most significant artists of the twentieth century, Jean-Michel Basquiat began his brief but prolific life as an artist painting the tag SAMO across downtown New York as a teenager in the late 1970s. Soon entrenched in the downtown cultural scene, he began to paint on canvas, creating compositions that combine numerous ideas—ranging from a celebration of Black music and sports and an exploration of African American history to critiques of abuses of power by the police.

The band was named after Gray’s Anatomy, a classic anatomy book given to him as a child after he was hit by a car, which inspired the exposed skeletons and internal organs in his figures.

Basquiat was a self-taught artist whose symbolic compositions combine colorful, naïve stick figures—appearing as if they are floating in space—with cryptic, poetic words written in assertive capital letters, often repeated and crossed out. Music was hugely influential to Basquiat; he regularly attended Mudd Club and other countercultural venues and formed his own no-wave band, Gray. The band was named after Gray’s Anatomy, a classic anatomy book given to him as a child after he was hit by a car, which inspired the exposed skeletons and internal organs in his figures.

For Luna Luna, Basquiat designed a Ferris wheel on which recurrent subjects from his earlier work appear, including jazz musician Charlie Parker (referenced with the song title “Billie’s Bounce”) and race (referenced with the words “Jim Crow”). The wheel is accompanied by Miles Davis’s 1986 song “Tutu.” It was only after Heller had secured permission to use the song that Basquiat agreed to create the Ferris wheel.