Sell Grit 1983

Jean-Michel Basquiat created “Sell Grit” using paint stick and oil stick on paper. Basquiat emerged in the 1980s from a street art background, at a time when graffiti was seen as vandalism by city authorities, and its practitioners were criminalised. Yet almost overnight, a few graffiti artists like Basquiat were catapulted into the commercial art world, raising questions about what kind of art institutions were willing to valorise and what kind they weren’t. In this artwork, Basquiat’s style suggests a combination of graffiti and more conventional painting techniques. The juxtaposition of a black paint stroke, an African American figure in the upper right corner, and a symbol of the shoe repeated over and over suggests themes of race, poverty, and labor. The meanings of Basquiat’s images are never fixed. If we want to truly appreciate the depth of the artwork, we have to research the artist’s life, the histories of graffiti and street art, and the economic conditions in New York City in the 1980s.