The Guggenheim’s Scapegoat
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Defacement is a beautiful painting—and an ugly one. Its alternative name, The Death of Michael Stewart, reveals its subject: a young Black man who died in police custody in 1983, after his arrest for allegedly writing graffiti on the wall of a subway station in New York City.
Stewart’s death shocked the city’s artists, many of whom had known him personally. It resonated in particular with young Black men such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Fred Brathwaite, known as Fab 5 Freddy, who had also been labeled as graffiti artists—undisciplined, dangerous outlaws—even though they were now working on canvas and selling in galleries. “I remember being with Jean-Michel,” Fab told me. “We would look at each other, without having to say it: We know that could be us.” The six officers tried in relation to Stewart’s death were cleared two years later by an all-white jury.
Basquiat took his fear and his anger and responded in the way he knew best. In the days after Stewart’s death, he painted Defacement onto the studio wall of another artist, Keith Haring, in precise, furious strokes: two piglike figures in uniform, raising their batons at a black silhouette. The word ¿DEFACEMENT©? looms above them, posing a question. Which is the greater defacement: writing on a subway wall, or the police brutality that wipes out young Black men’s lives?
Haring later cut Defacement out of his wall, then mounted it in a gold frame and hung it over his bed. He died in 1990, of complications from AIDS, only two years after Basquiat’s own death from a heroin overdose. The painting went to Haring’s goddaughter, Nina Clemente, and at some point an independent Basquiat scholar named Chaédria LaBouvier heard about it. She had been captivated by Basquiat since childhood; her parents had owned three of his drawings.
In 2016, LaBouvier, then in her early 30s, arranged for the Williams College Museum of Art, in Massachusetts, to display Defacement as a powerful statement about police brutality by an artist whose commercial and critical reputation has continued to rise since his death. Nancy Spector, who would soon become artistic director and chief curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in New York, learned about LaBouvier’s work on the painting. She asked LaBouvier if she would like to collaborate on an exhibition where Defacement could be shown alongside other art responding to the death of Michael Stewart. The exhibition would speak to the political moment: In the years since 17-year-old Trayvon Martin had been shot dead, the Black Lives Matter movement had been steadily gaining strength.
Spector’s offer led to a high-profile exhibition at one of New York’s most prominent art institutions, making LaBouvier a trailblazing Black curator in a white-dominated world. It also began a chain of events that, in the summer after George Floyd’s murder, saw Spector cast out of the Guggenheim, branded a racist and a bully, and left unemployed—a phenomenon the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo described to me as a “social death.” All of this happened even though an independent investigation found “no evidence” that Spector had racially discriminated against LaBouvier.
How did a simple offer, over a single painting, lead to such a spectacular destruction of someone’s life and career? The answer involves the shifting sands of American corporate life, as newly activist staff demand that institutions take political positions. But there is also a much older ritual at work: the tendency of the powerful, when faced with rebellion and called to account for their own behavior, to dump all their errors on a single individual, whose removal then wipes the record clean.
Nancy Spector, in other words, was a scapegoat.
great museums are beset by the same sins. Their low-paid staff struggle to make rent in expensive cities. Curators must answer to boards speckled with old-money elites and the socialite spouses of banking titans. In some museums, almost every gallery bears the name of a different donor. (The Guggenheim, like many others, has airbrushed out by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The collections are slowly diversifying, but only 1.2 percent of artworks across 18 major American museums are by Black artists, and the big crowds still flock to the Great White Males: Picasso, Monet, van Gogh, Pollock, Warhol. All of these realities have left museums with authority on the legacy of slavery and segregation, the toll of police violence, and racial injustice.
