For decades the cryptic tag SAMO© has been treated as the youthful alias of Jean-Michel Basquiat. The other half of the partnership, the Brooklyn graffiti writer Al Diaz, is using his first British exhibition to set the record straight. Diaz, who wrote under the name Bomb One, met Basquiat in the mid-1970s at City-As-School, an alternative high school in New York. In 1978 the teenagers began covering Lower Manhattan with short, sardonic statements signed SAMO©, short for "same old shit". Rather than repeating their names like subway writers, the pair mocked the language of advertising and branding, turning it inside out on walls across the city. Diaz has described the project as an experiment in hype: an attempt to sell an imaginary product. A 1978 feature in the Village Voice gave the duo art-world visibility and ended their street anonymity; by 1979 the collaboration was over, sealed when the words "SAMO© IS DEAD" appeared sprayed across the city. Basquiat went on to solo fame before his death in 1988, while Diaz stepped away from graffiti for years, working in construction and carpentry. Diaz revived the project in 2016, arguing that the accepted history had drifted too far from the truth and that, as its co-creator, he owed the story a correction. Now, nearly five decades after the first SAMO© slogans appeared, he has opened "SAMO: Transatlantication" at D'Stassi Art on Hoxton Street in London, his debut show in the UK. The exhibition, which opened on 25 September 2026, pairs new canvases with works built from cut-up New York subway signage, a material Diaz has made his own in recent years. During the visit Diaz is also painting a mural and staging public interventions around Shoreditch, returning SAMO© to the street format where it began. For an artist who watched his teenage invention become globally famous under someone else's name, the London outing is both a homecoming for the work and a long-overdue credit line.