10 Facts About Jean-Michel Basquiat's Hollywood Africans

Hollywood Africans depicts three figures, featuring Basquiat, Toxic and Rammellzee. Toxic is an American artist who was part of the graffiti movement in 1980s New York, and eventually transitioned from street art to gallery featured exhibitions. Rammellzee was a visual artist, performer and hip-hop musician, whose earlier fame is credited to his prolific graffiti on subway trains.

After achieving success in the New York art scene in the early 1980s, Basquiat and his friends set out for LA. Hollywood Africans became a rumination on the trip, LA culture, and the movie industry. Despite Hollywood already being a popular subject matter with artists such as Andy Warhol, Basquiat took a more sharply critical stance against the cultural phenomena of celebrity and on-screen representation.

Basquiat was known to cross out words in his pieces in order to draw more attention to them. For example, the phrase 'Hollywood Africans from the nineteen forties' alludes to the year that actress Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an Oscar for playing the racial caricature 'Mammy’ in Gone With The Wind.

Words and phrases are scattered across the canvas, such as ‘Sugar Cane’, ‘Gangsterism’, ‘What is Bwana’, and ‘Tobacco’. These words reference racist entertainment industry stereotypes, and allude to the limited roles available to black actors in old Hollywood movies. The notion of exclusion is further highlighted in the crossed out words and phrases.

These colours create a stark contrast, drawing attention to the figures and text while evoking the bright lights of Hollywood and its deceptively glamorous presentation. Basquiat’s style in this work is characterised by a raw, expressive quality. The use of bold lines, rapid brushstrokes, and a combination of abstract and figurative elements contributes to the painting's intense emotional impact.

The fused styles of street art and Abstract Expressionism lend the painting a raw energy, and serves as an ode to Basquiat’s early graffiti career. He uses the text and imagery to highlight how African Americans have often been reduced to caricatures and their contributions to culture and society are marginalised.

Identity is a common theme within Basquiat’s oeuvre, and in Hollywood Africans, Basquiat presents himself and his friends as proud individuals, resisting the erasure and misrepresentation they face. Painted the same year as Michael Stewart’s death by police brutality, this piece acts as a statement of defiance against racial injustice.

Basquiat was often confronted with the duality of his identity as a successful Black artist in a predominantly white industry, this theme often manifesting itself within his art. Hollywood Africans is an assertion of his identity and agency within a system that often seeks to commodify and diminish him.

Critics have praised Basquiat’s powerful commentary and innovative use of text and imagery, the painting remaining relevant today and resonating with ongoing discussions about representation and systemic racism in the media. It continues to be celebrated for its boldness and profundity, cementing Basquiat's legacy as a pioneering artist.

Hollywood Africans continues to be displayed and admired, demonstrating its lasting legacy within contemporary art. It is part of the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and in 2017 it was exhibited at the Barbican Centre in London as part of Basquiat: Boom for Real.