NEW YORK — For the past six years Al Diaz has been looking for signs — literally. He visits subway stations and grabs the notices the city’s transit authority posts after a paint job. At one point, Diaz estimates, he’d stockpiled 300 of the wet-paint signs, although right now pickings are slim. “I haven’t seen a lot out there lately,” Diaz says, as he sits in a Brooklyn café on a Friday in late November. “It’s funny. Sometimes there’s periods where they’re painting the s--- out of the train stations. Right now, I don’t know. Maybe they’ll spruce up things up for Christmas.” Much like a kidnapper making a ransom note, Diaz cuts up and arranges the sign’s individual letters to create slogans such as “We Await a New Time” or terse bits of social commentary — for example, a photo of a decimated building captioned “real estate 4 sale.” He then tapes the reconfigured signs back up on subway walls. “They don’t stay up long,” says Diaz, “so you make them with the acceptance that it’s a throwaway. Sometimes it’s a lot of work, so it’s kind of a sacrificial lamb.” He continues: “It’s definitely in the spirit of grafitti. It’s subway, it’s New York, it’s outlaw. You don’t want to get caught doing it. It’s recycling materials, it’s making comments.” The signs are also an acknowledgement of his past. From 1977 to 1979 the now-55-year-old Diaz and the late Jean-Michel Basquiat (arguably the most important, iconic artist of his generation) were SAMO©, a text-based and self-proclaimed “experiment in hype.” SAMO© — the acronym stood for “same old s---” — helped put Basquiat on the map and is so associated with the painter, who died of a heroin overdose in 1988 at age 27, that it would be easy to think that SAMO© was a one-man show. Now, Al Diaz is in the midst of reclaiming a legacy that many are unaware he helped to create.
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 11:33:36 +0000
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