This painting is in acrylic on canvas, unlike many of his other works which were often mixed media as he used whatever he had to hand to achieve his vision. As with many other pieces, it features a person of colour, a man standing tall to the left of the canvas, one hand raised menacingly.
The red man of the image is furious and seems to be shaking his fist at the modern clutter that occupies in discordant composition the remainder of the canvas. While the man is depicted with anatomical detail underlying the muscles and skin – thanks to Basquiat's mother purchasing a copy of Grey's Anatomy for her budding artist son in his youth – and coloured in shades of red and black with vibrant yellow highlights, all of which infuse the figure with the heat of its anger and a certain solidity of appearance, the remaining sections of the painting are less well defined, somehow ephemeral and lacking in importance and gravitas.
They include cartoonishly sketched planes and cars, seeming, against the scrubbed ochre background to be almost like primitive cave paintings, rendering of things seen and remembered without true understanding of what they mean. The impression this offers is of a Native American – perhaps 'the' Native American, a figure that represents every dispossessed person of the aboriginal tribes of America – seeing the advent of modern technology sweeping into their world, furious about it and yet powerless against the encroaching tide.
The right-hand side of the canvas is more enigmatic. A seemingly unfinished section of the canvas – no textured ochre background here – features the word BOAR in a number of variations, while below the words, a yellow car – more clearly depicted than those in the centre of the painting – drives away off to right.
Below the mysterious white space is a crown, enclosed in a black box with a blue background, the crown itself gleaming yellow and red. The crown was known to be one of Basquiat's 'tags' in his street art days, and it appears frequently in his paintings. Here, perhaps in this protest against the advance of European culture swamping Native American cultures, he has locked his art in a box, whether to defend it from the onslaught or simply to keep it in his own possession.
