 | | Chaédria LaBouvier, center, organized "Basquiat's 'Defacement': The Untold Story" at the Guggenheim about the reaction of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the downtown community to the death of Michael Stewart. Top right, "Charles the First," 1982, a Basquiat tribute to Charlie Parker that depicted him as a peer of King Charles I and Thor, the Norse god of thunder. Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Licensed by Artestar; Mary Inhea Kang for The New York Times | | | On a recent day in the top-floor gallery of the Guggenheim Museum, Chaédria LaBouvier, a 34-year-old independent curator and the first black woman to organize a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim, contemplated the small, ostensibly minor painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat that drove her to years of fervent research. | | In the Basquiat canon, it was "a not very good scrap of painting," The New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl recently wrote. It was almost not a discrete work of art at all. Mr. Basquiat painted it directly onto Keith Haring's studio wall; it would have been lost had Mr. Haring not cut it out and set it like a masterpiece in the ornate frame it still inhabits. (It was over Mr. Haring's bed at the time of his death.) | | But "Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart)" is also, as far as Ms. LaBouvier or anyone else has determined, the only work in Mr. Basquiat's vast oeuvre that addresses a current event of his time — a gruesome tragedy that took the life of a young black artist and shook the Lower East Side art community. | | "This was a form of evidence, in a sense," Ms. LaBouvier said. | | Her show, "Basquiat's 'Defacement': The Untold Story," centers on this piece as it develops a picture of the death of the 25-year-old man grievously injured in transit police custody and its effect on other artists. The exhibition argues for a fresh look at the impact of the racial tension of the 1980s on Basquiat and his peers. In so doing it uncovers new material, including several works that important artists made in response to the incident that have never been shown before. And it presents, for the first time, some of the artwork that Mr. Stewart himself had been making. | 
Basquiat painted "The Death of Michael Stewart"; on a wall of Keith Haring's studio in NoHo in 1983. In 1985, Haring cut out a portion of drywall and his friend Sam Havadtoy added a frame befitting a masterpiece. Basquiat told friends that he identified with Stewart, the immobile figure at center: it could have been any black man in the wrong place.
Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Licensed by Artestar; Mary Inhea Kang for The New York Times | | Exactly what happened when the police apprehended Mr. Stewart, a Pratt Institute student, at the First Avenue subway station in the early hours of Sept. 15, 1983, remains unsettled, many years after a grand jury's decision not to indict several officers, and a subsequent settlement awarded to the Stewart family. What is known is that the police brought him, hogtied and badly injured, to Bellevue Hospital, where he died after two weeks in a coma. | | Mr. Basquiat's piece shows two red-faced police in blue uniform, one baring pointy teeth, with batons raised over an all-black silhouette. The word "¿DEFACEMENT©?" is printed above them in the familiar Basquiat scrawl. | | The piece was never sold (its owner is Nina Clemente, Mr. Haring's goddaughter) and has seldom been shown. Its most recent appearance was in a one-work exhibition and discussion program Ms. LaBouvier organized at the Williams College Museum of Art in 2016. | | The current exhibition puts it in a double artistic context. Eight classic Basquiat works from 1982-83, are shown in the same room, including, pointedly, two pieces that present racialized police figures, "La Hara" and "Irony of a Negro Policeman." | | They attest to his awareness of the constant menace of policing to young black men like him, and the psychic burden that came with it. | | "I think there are critics who have underestimated the centrality of that threat," Ms. LaBouvier said. "You can almost feel the heat from the paintings." | | Walk past a blown-up Haring photograph of his studio wall, with the Basquiat piece cut out, into the exhibition's second room, and second layer of context, and you will find works by Mr. Haring, Andy Warhol, David Hammons, Eric Drooker, George Condo, David Wojnarowicz (whose unsigned protest flyer clearly inspired Mr. Basquiat's painting), and Lyle Ashton Harris. All respond, whether in the heat of the moment or years later, to Mr. Stewart's beating and death. | | To continue reading, click here. | | |
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