Jughead

Basquiat was a groundbreaking artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent who emerged in the downtown art scene of New York in the early 1980s and who personified a pivotal cultural moment fusing art, hip-hop, and performance. Complex, layered, and highly allegorical, Jughead is characteristic of Basquiat's late style, its surface an amalgamation of symbols, letters, and marks and its style a fusion of abstraction and representation. Anchoring the composition is the word "Jughead." Rendered in a swooping, curling hand, it might refer to the eponymous character from the comic Archie, one of the many such forms of popular culture on which Basquiat drew. The remainder of the canvas is replete with all manner of symbols (a few of which seem to have been adapted from Henry Dreyfuss's book Symbol Sourcebook (1972), with which Basquiat was familiar) and dense with word play and word association, all of it meant to function both visually and sonically. Basquiat was intimate with early hip-hop artists, with whom he honed his appreciation for freestyle sampling, which is key to works such as this one. Jughead exemplifies Basquiat's commitment to searing social and political commentary. The phrase 'money maker' as well as references to "banks" and "bills" appear at the right near an image of a white man holding a dollar bill, his intentions mercenary, perhaps even directly intended to disenfranchise Blacks, if the nearby words skin, victim, black, and color are any indication.