THE SCAPEGOAT

A MUSEUM CURATOR WAS FORCED OUT of HER JOB OVER ALLEGATIONS of RACISM THAT AN INVESTIGATION DEEMED UNFOUNDED. WHAT DID HER DEFENESTRATION ACCOMPLISH?

- HELEN LEWIS

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 ¿DEFACEMENTO? 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.