50 Cent Piece by Jean-Michel Basquiat is one of the most geographically and historically expansive works in his output — a screenprint in which the Caribbean colonial economy is laid out not as history but as a living diagram, the raw materials of sugar cane, rum, bananas, and bauxite sitting alongside Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement, the Bank of Jamaica, François Duvalier, the U.S. occupation of Haiti, and Operation Bootstrap — Puerto Rico's mid-century industrialisation programme, which promised economic development and delivered cheap labour for American corporations.

Both sides of Basquiat's heritage are present. His father was Haitian, his mother Puerto Rican, and the Atlantic world that produced him — shaped by slavery, colonial extraction, and the systematic transfer of wealth from the Caribbean to Europe and North America — is the subject of this work as directly as he ever addressed it. The fifty cent piece of the title is American currency, and the work asks what that currency was built on and whose labour underwrote it.

Basquiat had been thinking about these questions since childhood, growing up between Brooklyn and Puerto Rico, moving between English, French, and Spanish, absorbing histories that American schools had no interest in teaching. By 1982 he was one of the most visible young artists in New York, represented by Annina Nosei and courted by collectors who understood his market value without necessarily understanding what his work was saying — a irony the imagery of 50 Cent Piece, with its Federal Reserve notes and trademark symbols appended to the names of Caribbean commodities, makes difficult to ignore. Jean-Michel Basquiat made the original painting in 1982; his Estate issued this screenprint in an edition of 60 in 2020.

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