“The Death of Michael Stewart,” from 1983 © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat / Artestar
Hailing from Brooklyn, Black 25-year old artist Michael Stewart joined the emerging East Village art scene in 1983 when he leased his first studio in the Anderson Theater for $25 a month. In the early morning hours of September 15 of that year, Stewart and his buddy George Condo tried to get into a party at Keith Haring’s Broome Street loft before hitting up the Pyramid Club on Avenue A. Ready to head home, Stewart entered the L train station on First Avenue and 14th Street.
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New York City Transit Police Officer John Kostick later testified under oath that he saw Stewart writing graffiti on the wall at 2:30 a.m. He claimed Stewart surrendered without resistance, but then attempted to run while handcuffed, tripped, and fell face first. Other witnesses testified to seeing Stewart brutally beaten, shouting “someone help me, someone help me!” before being hog-tied and thrown in a police van. Half an hour later, Stewart arrived at Bellevue Hospital comatose. He never regained consciousness and died on September 28. Two years later, an all-white jury acquitted the six NYPD officers charged in the killing of Michael Stewart.
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Stewart’s death did not go unrecognized—then or now. In Basquiat’s “Defacement”: The Untold Story, guest curator Chaédria LaBouvier has organized a deeply moving exhibition that takes Jean-Michel Basquiat’s deeply personal and rarely exhibited painting made the week of Stewart’s death as its starting point, opening a conversation about police brutality that transcends the time in which the work was made.
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We brought together a group of legendary graffiti writers and contemporaries of Basquiat and Stewart to reflect on surviving New York in the 1980s.
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“Back of the Neck,” from 1983.© Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat / Artestar