When notable street artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, passed a spiral notebook back and forth with his high school classmates, he surely didn’t anticipate the collaboration being at the center of a heated lawsuit. Al Diaz and Shannon Dawson, Basquiat’s adolescent cohorts, are suing Yale University’s Beinecke Library to have their contributions to the “SAMO© high-school notebook” recognized.
Diaz and Dawson claim that Yale has glossed over their roles in creating the notebook that is bursting with puns, notes, doodles, and scribblings, and are passing it off as a priceless piece of Basquiat’s oeuvre. The duo also claimed that the book was stolen from Dawson and somehow ended up in Yale’s library. The respected institution reportedly paid as much as $40,000 for the notebook.
The lawsuit raises a number of questions concerning artist ephemera, a notoriously difficult thing to trace. The fact that Diaz and Dawson had a falling out with Basquiat after the artist rose to fame also makes navigating the case difficult.
