A Comparative Essay

There are moments in art history when an image refuses to stay in its own time. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s All Colored Cast (Part III), painted in 1982 in a studio apartment on Market Street in Venice, California, is one of those images. Rendered in acrylic and crayon on a luminous yellow canvas, the painting presents a dark central figure — skull-faced, skeletal, elemental — surrounded by a dense field of words, numbers, and symbols that seem, at first glance, chaotic. Set beside a photograph taken decades later of Ermias Joseph Asghedom — known to the world as Nipsey Hussle — standing at Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, Japan, something extraordinary comes into focus. The two images are separated by time, medium, and geography, yet they speak to one another with an intimacy that defies coincidence. Basquiat painted a world. Nipsey Hussle lived in it. To place these two images side by side is to witness what the painting, in retrospect, may have always been: a premonition.

The name written in the uppermost register of the painting, bold and declarative above all else, is ALEXANDER THE GREAT. It is the first thing the eye finds, positioned like a headline or a title, presiding over the entire composition. Nipsey Hussle operated under the Twitter handle @NipseyHussle with the display name “Tha Great” — a direct echo of this inscription, as if he, too, had absorbed the painting’s crown before he ever saw it. But the connection runs deeper than a social media name. The marathon — the athletic contest born in ancient Greece, the country Alexander the Great led and from which he launched his campaigns of conquest — became the organizing metaphor of Nipsey Hussle’s entire career and life philosophy. The word marathon itself traces back to one of the most enduring legends of antiquity: the story of Pheidippides, a Greek courier who in 490 BC ran from the battlefield at Marathon to Athens — approximately forty kilometers — to deliver news of the Greeks’ stunning victory over the Persian invaders. According to legend, upon delivering his message of triumph, Pheidippides collapsed and died, having given everything in service of his people. It was this act of supreme endurance and sacrifice that gave the world the concept of the marathon — the idea that a man could run until there was nothing left, fueled entirely by purpose. Nipsey Hussle built his entire brand on that mythology. His landmark mixtape series was called The Marathon. His clothing store, opened in the heart of Crenshaw, was called The Marathon Clothing. His debut studio album, released in 2018, was called Victory Lap — the triumphant ceremonial circuit run by a winner, rooted in the tradition of Greek athletic glory, from the same civilization over which Alexander presided and through whose soil Pheidippides ran until his final breath. Basquiat wrote ALEXANDER THE GREAT at the top of this painting in 1982. Nipsey Hussle spent his life running a marathon, took his victory lap, and signed his name “Tha Great” along the way.

The painting is populated with words that, examined through the lens of Nipsey’s life, take on the weight of prophecy. FKGD appears on the canvas in red lettering — the ticker symbol of Cairn Energy PLC, a company that went public in 1980 — placing corporate and financial language directly inside the composition, consistent with Nipsey’s lifelong insistence on Black economic ownership and his own status as an entrepreneur and independent record label owner. The number 109 appears inscribed on the canvas as part of the notation “109-235 (SIC).” In the photograph of Nipsey standing at Shibuya Crossing, the number 109 is also present — not written on a canvas, but rendered in neon on the face of the iconic Shibuya 109 building, the landmark department store that has stood at that crossing since 1979, three years before the painting was made. The same number, 109, appears in both images — one inscribed by a painter’s hand in a Venice Beach studio, the other iconic sign above a rapper’s head in Tokyo. These are not the same 109, and yet they are precisely the same 109. The painting put the number there first.

Most devastating of all are three words in the lower left quadrant of the painting, presented as a numbered anatomical list with arrows pointing toward the central figure’s body: 6. LIVER→ and 7. LUNGS→, and inscribed across the figure’s dark torso, the word CHEST. These are not decorative elements. They are labels — clinical, precise, directional. They identify the organs. On March 31, 2019, Nipsey Hussle was shot multiple times outside his Marathon Clothing store on Crenshaw and Slauson. The bullets that felled him pierced his chest, his liver, and his lungs — the exact three organs Basquiat labeled on the body of his central figure in 1982, thirty-seven years before the shooting. The word CHEST is written on the figure’s torso. The arrows point “Nwyrd”. The painting knew.

The two images also share a spiritual and ancestral undertow that flows through the Haitian connection. Basquiat’s father, Gérard Basquiat, was a Haitian immigrant from Port-au-Prince, and that heritage saturated the painter’s visual vocabulary. Scholars have noted that a black-hatted figure recurring in Basquiat’s work is believed to represent Baron Samedi — the chief lwa of the Gede family in Haitian Vodou, the spirit of death and resurrection, the guardian of the boundary between the living and the dead. The word HAITI© appears on the canvas of All Colored Cast (Part III), circled like a signature, like a claim. Nipsey Hussle’s mother, Angelique Smith née Boutte, traced her roots to Louisiana — the American territory most saturated with the Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions, including the Vodou-derived practices that traveled from Haiti to New Orleans and seeped into the soil of Creole culture. Basquiat carried Haiti through his father’s blood. Nipsey carried it through his mother’s Louisiana inheritance. Both men were touched by the same spiritual geography, and it is that geography — with its traditions of death, transformation, and sacred persistence — that makes the premonitory quality of this painting feel less like coincidence and more like covenant.

TOUSSAINT L’OVERTURE also appears on the canvas — the name of Haiti’s revolutionary liberator, the man who led the only successful slave revolt in the history of the Western world. His name, inscribed beside the skull-faced figure, reminds us that the tradition both men inherited was always one of defiance against impossible odds, of a people who refused to be conquered. Nipsey Hussle was, in this lineage, a revolutionary in modern dress.

Finally, the letters FKGD, placed just above the figure’s head in the painting, hover like an inscription above a crown — and the name Ermias, which Nipsey’s father gave him from the ancient Semitic and Aksumite Christian tradition, means God will rise. FKGD: a cipher hovering above a sacred head. Ermias: God will rise. The painting placed it there in 1982. The man arrived in 1985. The marathon, as he always said, continues.