Basquiat's Memorial to a Young Artist Killed by Police

H-Haiti "Basquiat’s Memorial to a Young Artist Killed by Police" by Peter SCHIELDAHL

Discussion published by Marlene Daut on Wednesday, July 3, 2019

Basquiat’s Memorial to a Young Artist Killed by Police

Distraught over the death of the graffiti artist Michael Stewart, he repeated, “It could have been me.”

By Peter Schjeldahl

July 1, 2019

Citation: Marlene Daut. "Basquiat’s Memorial to a Young Artist Killed by Police" by Peter SCHIELDAHL. H-Haiti. 07-03-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/116721/discussions/4262292/basquiat%E2%80%99s-memorial-young-artist-killed-police-peter-schielda hl Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Haiti

Basquiat’s “La Hara,” from 1981, conveys both menace and a peculiar majesty.

“Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: The Untold Story,” at the Guggenheim, is a small but timely and often surprising powerhouse of a historical show pegged to a not very good scrap of painting by a star- dusted name. The exhibition includes photographs, documents, and art works relating to the death, on September 28, 1983, of Michael Stewart, a twenty-five-year-old art student at Pratt and a frequenter of the time’s impoverished but raucous, creatively booming East Village and Lower East Side bohemia, from injuries incurred while in police custody. At some point later that year, Jean- Michel Basquiat used marker and acrylics to dash off a sketch of two fiendish cops beating an armless, legless figure, rendered in black silhouette. Lettered above the image is the legend “¿defacement©?,” with the second “e” crossed out. (The inverted Spanish question mark reflects the language of his mother’s Puerto Rican parents; his father was Haitian-born.) It was done on a graffiti- crowded plasterboard wall of the artist Keith Haring’s NoHo studio; unrelated tags of graffitists (Daze and Zephyr are legible) and random froths of spray paint share the surface. The police poses appear to have been loosely copied from a poster designed by the multitalented David Wojnarowicz, a then recent and increasingly forceful arrival on the downtown art scene, announcing a protest rally in Union Square that took place two days before the end of Stewart’s protracted death throes—he had been diagnosed as brain-dead—in Bellevue Hospital.

Read the rest here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/08/basquiats-memorial-to-a-young-artist-killed-b y-police