To see what Toxic looked like at the age of 18, the best way is to wander through the collections of the Whitney Museum in New York. Among Basquiat’s works, the canvas titled Hollywood Africans represents, in this unique visual language, a trio of artists formed by Basquiat himself, Rammellzee and Toxic, three «gangsters» stereotyped in the Hollywood myth, three Afro-American New Yorkers seeking to make their name in an even more inaccessible and ungrateful universe for talent from the margins, the suburbs and minorities. A series of words refers to the lackluster role reserved for blacks in the films of the golden age of cinema. Slashy, striped words that say a lot about the segregation that fractures society at the time.
