8 1988 paintings

A Pile of Crowns for Jean-Michel Basquiat is a painting created by American artist Keith Haring (1958–1990) in 1988. The artwork was made to memorialize his friend, artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. It depicts a towering pile of Basquiat's trademark crowns.

Apocalypse Now is a 1988 painting by the American artist Christopher Wool, widely regarded as among the most important of his "word paintings" created in the late 1980s. It consists of the words "SELL THE HOUSE SELL THE CAR SELL THE KIDS", stenciled in black, block letters in alkyd enamel on an off-white painted aluminum and steel plate measuring 84 x 72 inches. The quotation is from the 1979 Francis Ford Coppola movie Apocalypse Now, where it is written in a letter mailed home by a character who has lost his mind in the jungle.

The Dance of Salomé is the title of a series of 160 works consisting of 85 paintings and 75 drawings created by Nabil Kanso in 1988 and 1995. It is based on biblical and literary works with particular reference to Oscar Wilde’s 1891 play and Richard Strauss’s 1905 opera. The primary subject of all the works in the series is Salomé who is depicted in a sequence of scenes reflecting various nuances of perception in distinctive dance movement.

The First Supper (1988) is a work of art by Susan Dorothea White, based on Leonardo da Vinci's 1490s painting The Last Supper. White's painting is acrylic on a large wood panel and, in a challenge to the patriarchal concept of thirteen men on one side of a table, shows 13 women from all regions of the world; the woman in the position of Leonardo's Christ figure is an Australian aboriginal wearing a T-shirt with the Australian Aboriginal Flag. One woman seen is in the position of Judas. She dines on a Coca-Cola and a hamburger, while all the other women are seen with a bread roll and glass of water. The painting toured Australia in the Blake Prize for Religious Art exhibition in 1988, where it was ridiculed, before being exhibited in the artist's solo exhibition in Amsterdam, where it featured in the Dutch art journal Kunstbeeld: "The work shows clearly Susan White's thinking about human rights. It should be mentioned here that she sometimes places her many faceted talent at the service of the struggle for human rights".

Mirth & Girth is a portrait painting by School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) student David K. Nelson, Jr., depicting the recently-deceased popular African-American mayor of Chicago, Harold Washington wearing only a bra, G-string, garter belt and stockings. After a brief showing at a May 11, 1988 private student exhibition in the Art Institute, angry African-American aldermen, including Ald. Allan Streeter, Ald. Bobby Rush and Ald. Dorothy Tillman, arrived with Chicago Police Department officers and confiscated the painting, triggering a First Amendment and race relations crisis and a civil lawsuit.

Outsider is a painting dated from 1988 by post-modern indigenous Australian artist Gordon Bennett. The painting focuses on issues of the increasing isolation Indigenous Australians feel in their own country, with the date the painting was painted in (1988) being the bicentennial anniversary of white settlement in Australia. The painting is 290 × 180 cm, and was painted on canvas using oil and acrylic.

Second Version of Triptych 1944 is a 1988 triptych painted by the Irish-born artist Francis Bacon. It is a reworking of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944, Bacon's most widely known triptych, and the one which established his reputation as one of England's foremost post-war painters.