AL DรAZ

Al Dรญazโ€™s career spans five decades. Born and raised Puerto Rican in New York City, by age 15 he was an influential first-generation subway graffiti artist known as โ€œBOMB-ONE.โ€ His friendship and artistic collaboration with high school schoolmate Jean-Michel Basquiat on SAMOยฉ, (a late 70s Avant-garde graffiti tag project) has beennoted often in contemporary art history. Dรญaz later contributed percussion to numerous musical recordings and performances, including Basquiatโ€™s historic 1983 record, โ€œBeat Bop,โ€ (considered to be one of the earliest hip-hop albums).

Dรญaz is sought-after as an expert of New York City counterculture art. He appears often in publications, as a highlighted speaker for a variety of panel discussions at universities and museums (including Smithsonian Institution, the Brooklyn Museum, The New School and Christieโ€™s Education), and has been featured in several films, including Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat, BBCโ€™s American Masters โ€” Basquiat: Rage to Riches and Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child.

Dรญazโ€™ current creative practice in Brooklyn includes gathering the standard โ€œWET PAINTโ€ signage used throughout the NYC MTA, and reconstructing them to create clever, poignant anagrams in various mixed media and public art formats. His work is shown and privately collected internationally.

In 2018, Diaz authored SAMOยฉโ€ฆSINCE 1978, an in-depth, color illustrated history of the street art legacy that he began with Basquiat in the late 70s. A notebook that Dรญaz made with Basquiat in his teens is currently held in the collection of the Yale University Beinecke Library.

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