One of the most significant artists of the twentieth century, Jean-Michel Basquiat began his short but prolific life as an artist painting the tag SAMO across downtown New York as a teenager in the late 1970s. Soon entrenched in the downtown cultural scene, he began to paint on canvas, creating compositions that combine numerous ideas, including a celebration of Black music and sports, an exploration of African American history, and critiques of abuses of power by the police.

Basquiat was a self-taught artist whose symbolic compositions combine colorful, naïve stick figures—ungrounded, without perspective, appearing as if floating in space—and cryptic, poetic words written in assertive capital letters, often repeated and crossed out, to push the viewer to think harder as they read. Music was hugely influential to Basquiat; he regularly attended Mudd Club and other countercultural venues, and also formed his own no wave band, Gray, titled after the classic anatomical reference book Gray’s Anatomy—a book given to him as a child after he was hit by a car, which partly inspired the exposed skeletons and internal organs of his figures.

For Luna Luna, Basquiat designed a Ferris wheel on which recurrent subjects from his earlier work appear, including jazz musician Charlie Parker (referenced with the song title “Billie’s Bounce”) and race (referenced with the words “Jim Crow,” followed by a copyright symbol that points at the relationship between the laws regulating the segregation of Black people in the South and the ownership of a human life). The wheel is accompanied by Miles Davis’s 1986 song “Tutu.” It was only after Heller secured permission to use the song that Basquiat agreed to create the Ferris wheel.