Liberty, from the Daros Suite by Jean-Michel Basquiat splits its image down the middle — anatomical diagrams, teeth, glands, and skeletal notation on the left, an intensifying field of red on the right, the two halves moving from clinical analysis toward something closer to contamination or emergency. Roosevelt's ten cent piece sits at the centre. PETROL, LEAD, RADIUM, and ASBESTOS appear on the right, the vocabulary of industrial extraction embedded in the same image as the Federal Reserve note and the salivary gland.

The title names what the work refuses to accept as given. Liberty, as an American ideal, was built on a specific geography — the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour, the liberty coin in every pocket, the word stamped on currency that moved through an economy sustained by enslaved labour for two centuries before emancipation and by segregation for a century after it. Basquiat had been examining that gap throughout his career, and Liberty is the Daros Suite work in which the distance between the ideal and its material conditions is most explicitly mapped. The body on the left is the body that lives inside the economy on the right — the salivary glands and jaw leverage of a person who has to eat, placed alongside the Federal Reserve note that determines what eating costs.

The radium and lead and petrol are not rhetorical — they are the actual substances that contaminated the communities with the least power to resist industrial pollution in 1982, the same year Basquiat made this work, the year the Environmental Protection Agency was beginning to document what had been done to poor and non-white neighbourhoods in the name of economic development. Liberty names the promise. The right side of the image shows what the promise covered.

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