There are names in art history that become inseparable from a particular time and place. Al Diaz is one of them.
For more than five decades, the New York artist has worked with language, graffiti and the fabric of the city itself. He belongs to the first generation of New York graffiti writers, was already writing under the name BOMB-ONE as a teenager, later co-created SAMO© with his friend and schoolmate Jean-Michel Basquiat, performed on one of early hip-hop's most significant records, and subsequently developed an independent practice built around the words, signs and visual systems of New York City.
To understand Al Diaz only through Basquiat is therefore to understand only one chapter of a considerably larger story.
With Diaz's work coming to D'Stassi Art in London, we look back at the artist's extraordinary journey, from the trains and streets of 1970s New York to SAMO© and the downtown art scene, and finally to the text-based work he continues to make today.
Before SAMO: Al Diaz and the First Generation of New York Graffiti
Al Diaz and friends, New York, circa 1975. Photograph: Flint Gennari.
Al Diaz grew up in New York and began writing graffiti in his early teens, at a moment when what would eventually become a global visual culture was still an intensely local phenomenon.
This matters.
Today graffiti has a recognised history, an international market, major museum exhibitions and generations of artists working within and beyond its language. In the early 1970s, none of that infrastructure existed.
Diaz remembers writing primarily on trains, buses and trucks under the name BOMB-ONE. The structure followed an early convention of New York writing: a name accompanied by a number.
In a 2017 interview with Dazed, Diaz described the scene as an inner-city culture that had not yet become the international phenomenon it is today. Writing offered visibility, identity and competition. The objective was simple but radical: put your name somewhere, then put it somewhere else, and become known through repetition.
Diaz was there remarkably early.
His own biography describes him as a prolific first-generation subway graffiti artist by his mid-teens. His early experience of graffiti is important when considering everything that followed because, by the time he met Jean-Michel Basquiat, Diaz already understood the codes, techniques and culture of writing in public space.
Their eventual collaboration would take that vocabulary somewhere different.
Al Diaz Meets Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat, photographed by Al Diaz, circa 1977. Courtesy Al Diaz.
Diaz and Jean-Michel Basquiat became friends while attending City-As-School, an alternative high school in New York.
The friendship appears to have formed through shared humour as much as art.
Diaz has recalled that both young men were fascinated by words and language. They shared musical and artistic interests and spent time visiting museums as part of their studies.
This was before the international art market, before Warhol, before Basquiat's paintings entered museums and auction records.
They were teenagers.
Together with other students, Diaz and Basquiat became involved in a school publication called the Basement Blues Press. It was within this environment that an idea began developing around the word that would eventually become one of the most recognisable signatures in contemporary art history:
SAMO©.
The Barbican's extensive research for its 2017 exhibition Basquiat: Boom for Real traced early appearances of the idea through material connected with City-As-School and the Basement Blues Press before Diaz and Basquiat subsequently took SAMO© onto the streets.
The name was a play on "same old", commonly explained by Diaz and Basquiat as originating from the phrase "same old shit".
But SAMO quickly became considerably more interesting than its name.
What Was SAMO©?
An original SAMO© intervention in Lower Manhattan, photographed by Henry Flynt.
New York already had graffiti everywhere.
What Diaz and Basquiat introduced was something different.
Instead of concentrating on the repetition of a writer's name, SAMO© became a vehicle for sentences, fragments, propositions, jokes and provocations.
The pair wrote cryptic statements around Lower Manhattan, particularly in and around SoHo and the Lower East Side.
The subjects moved freely between art, commerce, religion, aspiration, politics and consumer culture. Sometimes funny, sometimes antagonistic and sometimes deliberately difficult to decipher, the SAMO writings functioned somewhere between graffiti, poetry, advertising and social criticism.
Diaz later described what they were doing as a form of commentary on the world around them.
That distinction is essential.
Early SAMO graffiti by Al Diaz and Jean-Michel Basquiat New York
SAMO© was not simply a tag shared by two young artists. The identity became a framework through which language itself could occupy public space.
The Barbican described the work as surreal and witty and noted that its tone differentiated it from much of the graffiti surrounding it. Avant-garde artist Henry Flynt photographed dozens of examples, preserving an important record of works that were otherwise inherently ephemeral.
They were producing something extraordinarily close to an analogue form of what we might now call viral communication.
A short phrase appeared on a wall.
Someone encountered it.
The same signature appeared elsewhere.
People began asking what SAMO was, or who SAMO was.
The mystery became part of the work.
When New York Began to Notice SAMO
By 1978, the experiment was attracting attention beyond the street.
The SoHo Weekly News published material concerning the mysterious SAMO writings, while The Village Voice subsequently identified "Jean" and "Al" as the people behind them.
For two teenagers experimenting with language in public, anonymity had suddenly become publicity.
And that publicity changed things.
The collaboration between Diaz and Basquiat did not last indefinitely. Their relationship around SAMO came to an end as their ambitions and lives moved in different directions. Basquiat increasingly entered the downtown art world and eventually began using the now famous declaration:
SAMO© IS DEAD.
The history that followed is considerably better known.
Basquiat's ascent was extraordinary. Within only a few years he moved from downtown New York into major exhibitions and international recognition, developing one of the most distinctive bodies of painting of the late twentieth century.
But the significance of SAMO within that story is difficult to overstate.
The Barbican notes that Basquiat first came to media attention through his collaboration with Diaz. Years before the paintings that would make Basquiat famous, the two artists had already discovered the power of combining words, repetition, public space, mystery and cultural commentary.
Many of the characteristics that art history would later associate with Basquiat's mature work were already being tested through language on the street.
And Al Diaz was there at its creation.
Al Diaz After SAMO
Rammellzee vs. K-Rob, Beat Bop, 1983. Produced and arranged by Jean-Michel Basquiat, with percussion by Al Diaz
This is where the story of Diaz and the story of Basquiat need to separate.
While Basquiat moved rapidly into painting and the commercial art world, Diaz increasingly explored music.
It was another period when the boundaries between art forms in downtown New York were unusually porous. Graffiti writers mixed with musicians, filmmakers, painters and performers, while hip-hop itself was emerging as a new cultural force.
Diaz became a percussionist and worked within this scene.
One particularly important recording brought him back together creatively with Basquiat.
In 1983, Diaz played percussion on Beat Bop, the extraordinary record by Rammellzee and K-Rob produced and arranged by Jean-Michel Basquiat.
The record has subsequently assumed legendary status within hip-hop history, but Diaz's presence on it provides another fascinating connection between some of the cultural movements developing simultaneously in New York.
Graffiti, music, visual art, language and performance were not separate worlds. They continually collided.
Diaz lived inside those collisions.
From New York Subway Signs to WET PAINT
The most interesting way to understand Al Diaz today is not as someone attempting to recreate the 1970s.
His contemporary work instead extends an obsession that has been there throughout his career: language.
Around 2008, Diaz began taking discarded WET PAINT signage from the New York subway system and cutting the printed letters apart.
There was a constraint built into the material.
He could only create language from the letters available to him.
Diaz began rearranging those letters into new words and phrases, initially as a private experiment. By around 2011, he had begun returning his newly configured signs to subway stations.
The city had provided the material.
Diaz altered its meaning.
Then he gave it back.
It is an elegant continuation of the thinking behind his earliest work.
With BOMB-ONE, the city was a surface on which identity could be written.
With SAMO©, it became a platform for ideas.
With the subway works, the visual language of the city itself becomes the raw material.
Signs intended to communicate institutional information are dismantled and transformed into something ambiguous, humorous, political or poetic.
Language is still doing the work.
The Return of SAMO©
In 2016, Diaz also began writing SAMO© again.
The decision was not simply nostalgic.
Diaz has spoken openly about wanting to address what he regarded as an increasingly distorted historical account of SAMO, particularly descriptions that reduced it to a Basquiat pseudonym rather than acknowledging the collaborative origins of the project.
Al Diaz creating a contemporary SAMO© intervention.
In a 2026 interview with zingmagazine, Diaz explained that his return to SAMO allowed him both to respond to contemporary politics and to demonstrate what the original format and logic of the project actually looked like.
The new statements retained the linguistic structure of their predecessors while addressing a different century.
This creates an unusual situation.
SAMO© belongs unmistakably to the cultural history of late-1970s New York, but one of its creators is still alive, still working and still developing its language.
For audiences accustomed to encountering the story through archival photographs or through the biography of Basquiat, that distinction is important.
SAMO is history.
Al Diaz is not.
Al Diaz as Artist, Historian and Witness
In recent years, Diaz has increasingly occupied another important position within graffiti culture.
He is not simply one of its practitioners. He is one of its witnesses.
In 2023, Diaz co-curated CITY OF KINGS: A History of New York City Graffiti at Howl! in New York alongside graffiti archivist and artist Eric "DEAL CIA" Felisbret and art educator Mariah Fox.
The exhibition assembled photographs, ephemera, film, personal archives and first-hand accounts to tell the history of New York graffiti through the people who participated in its creation.
That distinction feels particularly appropriate for Diaz.
He existed within New York graffiti before it had an established art-historical narrative. He saw SAMO develop from an adolescent idea into a piece of contemporary art history. He witnessed Basquiat before Basquiat became a global symbol. He participated in downtown music culture and watched graffiti move from something widely treated as delinquency into museums, galleries and auction houses.
Very few artists can speak about that history from the same position.
More Than "Basquiat's Friend"
There is an understandable problem in writing about Al Diaz.
Jean-Michel Basquiat became one of the most famous artists in the world.
His market, image and mythology have become so enormous that almost anyone who entered his life risks becoming a footnote to it.
But describing Al Diaz simply as "Basquiat's friend" gets the history backwards.
Diaz was already a graffiti writer before the two met.
They became friends.
Together they developed SAMO© and took it onto the streets.
They shared an interest in words, humour, music and art.
Then their paths diverged.
Basquiat's extraordinary subsequent career does not diminish the importance of the young artist standing beside him at the beginning.
If anything, returning to Diaz allows us to understand that beginning more clearly.
And his subsequent work demonstrates that the ideas that made SAMO compelling were not abandoned when the partnership ended.
The fascination with language remained.
The irreverence remained.
New York remained.
Most importantly, the desire to interrupt the ordinary visual environment and make somebody stop, read and think remained.
Al Diaz in London
More than forty-five years after SAMO© first appeared around Lower Manhattan, Al Diaz's practice continues to evolve.
This September, D'Stassi Art brings Diaz to London for an exhibition examining both that extraordinary history and the artist working today.
For us, this is precisely why Al matters.
The exhibition is not an attempt to reconstruct Basquiat's biography through somebody who knew him.
It is an opportunity to encounter Al Diaz.
A first-generation New York graffiti writer.
A co-creator of SAMO©.
A musician and participant in the downtown culture from which some of the most important art and music of the late twentieth century emerged.
A chronicler of graffiti history.
And an artist who, more than fifty years after he first began writing in New York, is still discovering what can happen when a few carefully chosen words are placed somewhere they were never expected to be.
Al Diaz opens at D'Stassi Art, London, in September 2026.
Further exhibition information and available works will be published by D'Stassi Art ahead of the opening.
Selected Sources and Further Reading
Research for this article draws upon Al Diaz's own published biography and first-person interviews alongside institutional research and archival material.
Al Diaz, official artist biography
Al Diaz's own biography covering BOMB-ONE, SAMO©, music, his subway-sign practice and later exhibitions.
Barbican Art Gallery, Basquiat: Boom for Real, 2017
The Barbican's exhibition research includes substantial archival material documenting City-As-School, the Basement Blues Press, the development of SAMO©, Henry Flynt's photographs and contemporary press coverage.
Ashleigh Kane, "The Story of SAMO©, Basquiat's First Art Project", Dazed, 2017
Extended first-person interview with Diaz discussing his early graffiti history, friendship with Basquiat, the creation of SAMO© and his later WET PAINT practice.
Street Art NYC, "Speaking with Al Diaz on Graffiti, SAMO©, Word-play", 2013
First-person discussion with Diaz covering BOMB-ONE, City-As-School, SAMO© and the origins of the subway-sign project.
Howl! Happening, CITY OF KINGS: A History of New York City Graffiti, 2023
Institutional record of the exhibition co-curated by Diaz exploring the development of New York graffiti through archival material and first-hand testimony.
Rachel Dalamangas, "Al Diaz is SAMO© and he's not making the same old art", zingmagazine, 2026
A recent interview with Diaz examining his contemporary practice and his decision to resume SAMO© writing in 2016.