Irony of the Negro Policeman

A jagged black figure in a policeman's cap looms within a cramped, scrawled space, hemmed in by words, marks, and a cage-like grid, the title scratched out beside him. Jean-Michel Basquiat, the young Black painter who rose from graffiti to art-world fame, made the Irony of the Negro Policeman a raw critique of how Black people can be enlisted to enforce the very systems that oppress them. Now in a private collection, it is among his most pointed works - identity, race, and power confronted in his urgent, graffiti-rooted Neo-Expressionist language of word, symbol, and slashing line.