Last of the Hollywood Africans: Toxic, Rammellzee and Basquiat
Basquiat's name sells out any room. A February 2013 exhibition at Londonewcastle Project Space set out to put him back among the friends he painted with, and to give the last surviving member of that trio his due.
Most people with any interest in art know the outline of the Jean-Michel Basquiat story. A young Black painter from Brooklyn comes up through the downtown scene of late-1970s New York, is taken up by Andy Warhol, shown by Larry Gagosian and Bruno Bischofberger, and dies of an overdose in 1988 at the age of 27. His paintings now fetch many millions. What the short version leaves out is how collaborative his life was, and that is the subject of Last of the Hollywood Africans, which opens at Londonewcastle Project Space on Redchurch Street, Shoreditch, with a private view on Friday 15 February 2013.
Downtown and uptown
Basquiat was never a solitary figure. He played in the band Gray, and he was a regular at the clubs where art, music and film overlapped: the Mudd Club, Club 57, CBGB, Hurrah and Tier 3. That put him in the same rooms as David Byrne, Blondie and Madonna. But he also kept close to what was happening in Harlem, the Bronx and Brooklyn, where hip hop was taking shape, and that brought him into contact with its DJs, producers and graffiti writers. Two of the most important to him were Rammellzee and Toxic, both rappers, painters and producers.
The three became close friends. On one of Basquiat’s long stays in Los Angeles in the early 1980s they travelled together, and all three were struck by how Hollywood had treated Black actors in the films of the 1940s and 1950s: servants, criminals, plantation hands, stereotypes. They started calling themselves the Hollywood Africans as a pointed joke about it. In Los Angeles in 1983 Basquiat painted Hollywood Africans, a picture with a schematic portrait of the three of them at its centre and the words SUGAR CANE, TOBACCO and GANGSTERISM written across a yellow ground, naming the parts on offer. The painting is now in the Whitney Museum of American Art. The same year Basquiat produced and designed the sleeve for Beat Bop, the record Rammellzee made with K-Rob, and Toxic went on to travel with him as friend and companion, including a trip to Jamaica.
Painters on their own terms
Toxic and Rammellzee both came out of the spray can, at the moment when the lettering running along the sides of subway cars was carrying a new generation’s work across every borough. They took that typography as a starting point but were never simply graffiti writers. They made a place of their own, and they were among the first to bring the art and sound of the Bronx and Queens before largely white downtown crowds, just as galleries were starting to take notice.
The press notes for the show describe them as outsiders who wanted the respect of their peers more than the approval of the art world, working, in Toxic’s phrase, “on their own terms”. Their work owed nothing to European tradition. It was abstract, loud in colour and full of movement, going straight from the imagination to the can. Rammellzee tried out unusual materials, building thick surfaces in epoxy resin; Toxic stayed with spray paint on canvases pinned to the wall.
The exhibition
The show combines art, music, film and mixed media from and about all three members, with film by Salomon Emquies, photographs by Christopher Makos and music and performance footage connected to Gray. Much of the film and photography of the trio has not been shown before. The title refers to Toxic himself, the last of the three still living. Rammellzee died in 2010. Toxic moved to Italy shortly before Basquiat’s death, and Basquiat is said to have phoned him constantly to check he was all right. He later lived in Paris and travelled across Europe before returning to New York, where he still works.
The argument of the exhibition is that Basquiat may be the famous one, but without Rammellzee and Toxic the idea of urban art today would look quite different. They were pioneers as musicians and tastemakers as much as painters.
It is curated by Jon Sexton, founder of The Proper Artists Group, a friend of Toxic’s for many years. Sexton spent long periods in New York and Los Angeles from his teens, met Rammellzee and Basquiat one summer in New York as a young fan, and began collecting Toxic, Keith Haring and other New York artists. He has used graffiti artists to design record sleeves for labels he has run since the early 1990s.
The private view is followed by an after-show at The Scotch in Mayfair with DJ Lord Jazz of Lords of the Underground. The exhibition runs until 24 February.