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MEET THE FIRST BLACK SOLO CURATOR AT THE GUGGENHEIM
CHAÉDRIA LABOUVIER UNCOVERS NEW RESEARCH ON BASQUIAT’S ‘DEFACEMENT’ PAINTING OF POLICE BRUTALITY.
Author: Keith Estiler
Since the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was founded in 1939, the museum has never enlisted a Black curator to single-handedly organize an exhibition based entirely on his or her research. Chaédria LaBouvier will change that when she makes history as the first Black solo curator to organize an exhibition inside the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed institute.
The Dallas-born journalist and activist has curated a pivotal show on Jean-Michel Basquiat that will launch at the New York City institution on June 21. The focal point of the presentation is Basquiat’s Defacement (1983) painting -- an artwork that has been largely overlooked within the late artist’s oeuvre and is considered as the first practice of activist art amongst his famous peers such as Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and David Hammons, among others.
LaBouvier's profound interest in Basquiat goes back to her childhood. She counts seeing a trio of his drawings hung on the wall of her family’s Texas home as her first encounter with his works. It wasn’t until she attended Williams College in Massachusetts back in 2003 when she started taking her research in Basquiat seriously. “I wanted to study him, Keith Haring, the African influence of Picasso's work, and I had to teach myself,” she tells HYPEBEAST. “So for the first 10 years of my Basquiat scholarship, I’m just looking for information because there really wasn't a field.”
Throughout her years-long study on the neo-expressionist icon’s artworks, the Defacement painting stood out from the vast collections of Basquiat artworks. The piece portrayed the last moments of 25-year-old artist Michael Stewart, who was beaten and arrested by New York City police officers in 1983 for spray-painting a wall in the East Village subway station. Following the incident, Stewart was taken to the hospital where he spent 13 days in a coma and then died of cardiac arrest. “I’ve been studying Basquiat since I was 18, but of all the works I’ve encountered, Defacement immediately struck me by its comparative minimalism, for Basquiat, for his body of work,” LaBouvier
describes of her first time viewing the artwork in a photograph back in 2005. “I immediately recognized, after a decade-plus of just looking at the work, that this was Basquiat engaging with trauma and a very specific type of trauma.”
Defacement was never meant to be shown to the public. LaBouvier tells us that Basquiat was devastated by the incident and went over to Haring’s studio to paint the piece on a wall. Haring cut the painting out of the wall and placed it inside an elaborate frame that was modeled after the Ritz Carlton. The work was hung over Haring’s bed for seven years until he died of AIDS-related causes in 1990. It was then left to the late artist’s god daughter, who still owns the piece. “I think it's really weird when people reach out to me and they're like, ‘Oh, this painting was never meant to be seen publicly?’ The issue of police brutality seems so straightforward, but 40 years ago, it wasn't. It was not a commonly assumed or understood fact,” says LaBouvier. “This is a painting that, for 36 years, the scope of it has escaped art historians. There was a lot of self-funded research on my part to back that up.”
In 2016, LaBouvier collaborated with the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) to exhibit Defacement. The artwork was mounted above the fireplace in the museum’s Reading Room, a non-traditional space which allowed for intimate discussions surrounding the painting. LaBouvier moderated a series of conversations that touched on critical issues evoked within the piece, which she described to the college at the time as “the vulnerability of the Black body, the limits of assimilation, and the idea of state violence as American heritage.”
The WCMA installation and programming initially sparked Guggenheim’s interest to kick off its own show. The museum reached out to LaBouvier in 2017 to spearhead the exhibition for Defacement. “This idea of trusting a 31-year-old to come in and curate a show based not only on one of the most popular artists of the planet, but also her idea that this is undiscovered art history is a big risk for the Guggenheim as a major institution,” says LaBouvier.
Pérez Art Museum Miami director Franklin Sirmans participated in the WCMA discussions. Sirmans emphasized the dynamic composition of the painting and its ability to touch on societal concerns from both the past and present. Attesting the work’s transcendent nature, LaBouvier's upcoming Guggenheim exhibition will expound on new research for Defacement. “New research is always good and Chaédria has certainly been at the forefront of illuminating important conversations around the social import of the work in the present,” says Sirmans. “While the artworks were made within a particular moment, the work of Basquiat is so damn good that, like great works of art, it’s importance and relevance to contemporary life only continues to be felt.”
“THIS IS A TOPIC THAT CHAÉDRIA HAS ENGAGED FOR MANY YEARS, BOTH PERSONALLY AND IN THE REALM OF HER BASQUIAT STUDIES. AT THE CENTER OF THIS PROJECT IS A MURDER, WHICH SHE KEPT ALWAYS IN MIND AND HEART.”
Since the Whitney Museum’s landmark survey in 1992, it’s been 27 years since a major New York City institution dedicated a solo exhibition on Basquiat. With LaBouvier’s Basquiat show set to take place at the Guggenheim, the forthcoming presentation marks much-needed and overdue recognition of Basquiat’s work in a major institution. Recent presentations have taken on retrospective models that lack much-needed research and information for viewers to fully comprehend the context of the paintings, as was the case at the recent show at The Brant Foundation this past March and another retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton last year. “A retrospective model, in a lot of respects, can be a really safe model,” LaBouvier explains. “Unless you're spending five or six years, you don't have time to go into detail with every painting. And that's really where the research, and scholarship, and the advancement happens.”
In contrast, LaBouvier’s show will isolate Defacement and explore its influence on various works created in the 1980s. The show will specifically focus on the mythos of the 1980s art world, societal racism and how Basquiat’s Defacement became the catalyst for future activist artworks amongst the late artist’s iconic peers. “Chaédria is a young scholar, but I think her work in this focus exhibition reflects a maturation of the Basquiat field, which is exciting to see,” says Janie Cohen, director of the Fleming Museum of Art at the University of Vermont and a published Pablo Picasso scholar.
“There is sparse history of major Basquiat exhibitions in New York City museums; MoMA and the Guggenheim have been most notably absent, given their respective missions, so it is good to see this happen.”
LaBouvier argues that Basquiat’s coterie were politically-engaged before Defacement was made, but the painting propelled Haring, Warhol, among other art world giants in his circle to organize as a community for the first time to raise awareness for societal issues, such as the AIDS crisis, and make artworks that follow suit. To be included in her exhibition and her published catalog for the show are interviews with Kenny Scharf, Dianne Brill, Fab Five Freddy and Karla McCormick that provide textual evidence to support her argument even further. “It's not like they weren't politically engaged or politically conscious before [Defacement], but this was different,” she says. “They organized as a community, as a team, in response, and that just hadn't happened before him.”
In addition to Defacement, the show will feature 14 additional paintings by Basquiat, including La Hara (1981) and Irony of Negro Policeman (1981). LaBouvier stresses that Defacement, La Hara and Irony of Negro Policeman constitute their own oeuvre as a police trilogy, and the Guggenheim exhibition represents the first time they will be shown together. Additionally, there will be artworks on display that shed light on Stewart’s murder, with pieces by Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, George Condo, David Hammons and Lyle Ashton Harris, as well as paintings and drawings by Stewart himself. “I think this is an important exhibition on multiple levels. Clearly, the examination of Defacement is timely in light of increased media focus on ongoing police violence against Black men in this country,” says Cohen. “This is a topic that Chaédria has engaged for many years, both personally and in the realm of her Basquiat studies. At the center of this project is a murder, which she kept always in mind and heart.”
The Guggenheim finally acknowledges Basquiat as a blue-chip artist with its upcoming exhibition and LaBouvier as its first Black solo curator. Although the museum describes her role as a “guest curator” in its exhibition announcement, the institute tells us that “Chaédria LaBouvier is among the first black curators who has organized an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, and the first black woman to be the sole curator of a Guggenheim exhibition.”
Art scholars and critics may name the late Nigerian art historian Okwui Enwezor as the museum’s first black curator, but the foundation itself only credits Enwezor as a contributor for its “In/Sight: African Photographers 1940 To The Present” 1996 exhibition in a public press statement. “The late, great Okwui Enwezor was the first Black curator (that I am aware of) to walk through the doors of the Guggenheim,” says LaBouvier. “If only he were here to tell us what happened.”
More recently in May, the Guggenheim worked with seminal Black contemporary artists Carrie Mae Weems and Julie Mehretu as part of what the museum bills as its “first-ever artist-curated exhibition,” entitled “Artistic License.” Although Weems and Mehretu are recognized for their curatorial contributions for the show that took place at the institution’s famous circle-shaped rotunda, they are not organizing an exhibition to the extent of LaBouvier’s forthcoming Basquiat presentation. Some could consider her this institution’s first Black curator or first Black woman curator. “Chaédria’s discovery of Defacement is particularly notable because of its historical significance, and the rarity of works made by Basquiat in response to a specific event,” says Cohen. “I do see Chaédria as the next generation of Basquiat scholars, taking this focus even further in her deep dive in research and analysis on one specific work, contextualized by
other works by Basquiat and his peers.”
“CHAÉDRIA LABOUVIER IS AMONG THE FIRST BLACK CURATORS WHO HAS ORGANIZED AN EXHIBITION AT THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, AND THE FIRST BLACK WOMAN TO BE THE SOLE CURATOR OF A GUGGENHEIM EXHIBITION.”
“Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: The Untold Story”
Ultimately, curator titles given to those who haven’t undergone extensive research on a particular artist, body of work, or field, downplays the legitimacy of traditional curators who devote their entire careers to elevate scholarship on a subject. LaBouvier says that she feels the need to protect her research on Basquiat, but also trust civic institutions such as the Guggenheim to protect her discoveries. “I think a lot of curators feel like they're pregnant, especially when they've been working on something for years,” says LaBouvier. “This thing [Defacement] that I felt I had to protect when other people didn't believe in it and it has this whole life of its own now. This is also part of the Guggenheim's history now. This is a painting that belongs to art history now.”
From her Black solo curator role to Basquiat’s long-awaited entrance at a second major NYC institution, LaBouvier’s Guggenheim show only begins to tackle to the systematic oppression inherent within the fine art world. She says there are institutional obstacles that both Black artists and curators have to overcome first before competing as equals with their white counterparts. “You have these hurdles that Black artists and curators of color have to get through, in terms of canonical and institutional issues, and then you have to get to the logistical questions that everyone in the art world has to face: ‘Can you afford to do this? Do you have the education? Do you have internships?’” she says. “And I think the art world is reflective of just America, in that it is just so sadly and embarrassingly acknowledging or realizing that Black history in all of its forms is also just History, with a capital H.”
LaBouvier’s 15-plus years of research on Basquiat will culminate in the exhibition entitled “Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: The Untold Story” running from June 21 to November 6 at the Guggenheim. Stay tuned for a look inside the exhibition.
Guggenheim
1071 5th Ave
https://view.ceros.com/hype-beast/meet-the-first-black-solo-curator-at-the-guggenheim/p/1
CHAÉDRIA LABOUVIER UNCOVERS NEW RESEARCH ON BASQUIAT’S ‘DEFACEMENT’ PAINTING OF POLICE BRUTALITY.
Author: Keith Estiler
Since the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was founded in 1939, the museum has never enlisted a Black curator to single-handedly organize an exhibition based entirely on his or her research. Chaédria LaBouvier will change that when she makes history as the first Black solo curator to organize an exhibition inside the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed institute.
The Dallas-born journalist and activist has curated a pivotal show on Jean-Michel Basquiat that will launch at the New York City institution on June 21. The focal point of the presentation is Basquiat’s Defacement (1983) painting -- an artwork that has been largely overlooked within the late artist’s oeuvre and is considered as the first practice of activist art amongst his famous peers such as Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and David Hammons, among others.
LaBouvier's profound interest in Basquiat goes back to her childhood. She counts seeing a trio of his drawings hung on the wall of her family’s Texas home as her first encounter with his works. It wasn’t until she attended Williams College in Massachusetts back in 2003 when she started taking her research in Basquiat seriously. “I wanted to study him, Keith Haring, the African influence of Picasso's work, and I had to teach myself,” she tells HYPEBEAST. “So for the first 10 years of my Basquiat scholarship, I’m just looking for information because there really wasn't a field.”
Throughout her years-long study on the neo-expressionist icon’s artworks, the Defacement painting stood out from the vast collections of Basquiat artworks. The piece portrayed the last moments of 25-year-old artist Michael Stewart, who was beaten and arrested by New York City police officers in 1983 for spray-painting a wall in the East Village subway station. Following the incident, Stewart was taken to the hospital where he spent 13 days in a coma and then died of cardiac arrest. “I’ve been studying Basquiat since I was 18, but of all the works I’ve encountered, Defacement immediately struck me by its comparative minimalism, for Basquiat, for his body of work,” LaBouvier
describes of her first time viewing the artwork in a photograph back in 2005. “I immediately recognized, after a decade-plus of just looking at the work, that this was Basquiat engaging with trauma and a very specific type of trauma.”
Defacement was never meant to be shown to the public. LaBouvier tells us that Basquiat was devastated by the incident and went over to Haring’s studio to paint the piece on a wall. Haring cut the painting out of the wall and placed it inside an elaborate frame that was modeled after the Ritz Carlton. The work was hung over Haring’s bed for seven years until he died of AIDS-related causes in 1990. It was then left to the late artist’s god daughter, who still owns the piece. “I think it's really weird when people reach out to me and they're like, ‘Oh, this painting was never meant to be seen publicly?’ The issue of police brutality seems so straightforward, but 40 years ago, it wasn't. It was not a commonly assumed or understood fact,” says LaBouvier. “This is a painting that, for 36 years, the scope of it has escaped art historians. There was a lot of self-funded research on my part to back that up.”
In 2016, LaBouvier collaborated with the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) to exhibit Defacement. The artwork was mounted above the fireplace in the museum’s Reading Room, a non-traditional space which allowed for intimate discussions surrounding the painting. LaBouvier moderated a series of conversations that touched on critical issues evoked within the piece, which she described to the college at the time as “the vulnerability of the Black body, the limits of assimilation, and the idea of state violence as American heritage.”
The WCMA installation and programming initially sparked Guggenheim’s interest to kick off its own show. The museum reached out to LaBouvier in 2017 to spearhead the exhibition for Defacement. “This idea of trusting a 31-year-old to come in and curate a show based not only on one of the most popular artists of the planet, but also her idea that this is undiscovered art history is a big risk for the Guggenheim as a major institution,” says LaBouvier.
Pérez Art Museum Miami director Franklin Sirmans participated in the WCMA discussions. Sirmans emphasized the dynamic composition of the painting and its ability to touch on societal concerns from both the past and present. Attesting the work’s transcendent nature, LaBouvier's upcoming Guggenheim exhibition will expound on new research for Defacement. “New research is always good and Chaédria has certainly been at the forefront of illuminating important conversations around the social import of the work in the present,” says Sirmans. “While the artworks were made within a particular moment, the work of Basquiat is so damn good that, like great works of art, it’s importance and relevance to contemporary life only continues to be felt.”
“THIS IS A TOPIC THAT CHAÉDRIA HAS ENGAGED FOR MANY YEARS, BOTH PERSONALLY AND IN THE REALM OF HER BASQUIAT STUDIES. AT THE CENTER OF THIS PROJECT IS A MURDER, WHICH SHE KEPT ALWAYS IN MIND AND HEART.”
Since the Whitney Museum’s landmark survey in 1992, it’s been 27 years since a major New York City institution dedicated a solo exhibition on Basquiat. With LaBouvier’s Basquiat show set to take place at the Guggenheim, the forthcoming presentation marks much-needed and overdue recognition of Basquiat’s work in a major institution. Recent presentations have taken on retrospective models that lack much-needed research and information for viewers to fully comprehend the context of the paintings, as was the case at the recent show at The Brant Foundation this past March and another retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton last year. “A retrospective model, in a lot of respects, can be a really safe model,” LaBouvier explains. “Unless you're spending five or six years, you don't have time to go into detail with every painting. And that's really where the research, and scholarship, and the advancement happens.”
In contrast, LaBouvier’s show will isolate Defacement and explore its influence on various works created in the 1980s. The show will specifically focus on the mythos of the 1980s art world, societal racism and how Basquiat’s Defacement became the catalyst for future activist artworks amongst the late artist’s iconic peers. “Chaédria is a young scholar, but I think her work in this focus exhibition reflects a maturation of the Basquiat field, which is exciting to see,” says Janie Cohen, director of the Fleming Museum of Art at the University of Vermont and a published Pablo Picasso scholar.
“There is sparse history of major Basquiat exhibitions in New York City museums; MoMA and the Guggenheim have been most notably absent, given their respective missions, so it is good to see this happen.”
LaBouvier argues that Basquiat’s coterie were politically-engaged before Defacement was made, but the painting propelled Haring, Warhol, among other art world giants in his circle to organize as a community for the first time to raise awareness for societal issues, such as the AIDS crisis, and make artworks that follow suit. To be included in her exhibition and her published catalog for the show are interviews with Kenny Scharf, Dianne Brill, Fab Five Freddy and Karla McCormick that provide textual evidence to support her argument even further. “It's not like they weren't politically engaged or politically conscious before [Defacement], but this was different,” she says. “They organized as a community, as a team, in response, and that just hadn't happened before him.”
In addition to Defacement, the show will feature 14 additional paintings by Basquiat, including La Hara (1981) and Irony of Negro Policeman (1981). LaBouvier stresses that Defacement, La Hara and Irony of Negro Policeman constitute their own oeuvre as a police trilogy, and the Guggenheim exhibition represents the first time they will be shown together. Additionally, there will be artworks on display that shed light on Stewart’s murder, with pieces by Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, George Condo, David Hammons and Lyle Ashton Harris, as well as paintings and drawings by Stewart himself. “I think this is an important exhibition on multiple levels. Clearly, the examination of Defacement is timely in light of increased media focus on ongoing police violence against Black men in this country,” says Cohen. “This is a topic that Chaédria has engaged for many years, both personally and in the realm of her Basquiat studies. At the center of this project is a murder, which she kept always in mind and heart.”
The Guggenheim finally acknowledges Basquiat as a blue-chip artist with its upcoming exhibition and LaBouvier as its first Black solo curator. Although the museum describes her role as a “guest curator” in its exhibition announcement, the institute tells us that “Chaédria LaBouvier is among the first black curators who has organized an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, and the first black woman to be the sole curator of a Guggenheim exhibition.”
Art scholars and critics may name the late Nigerian art historian Okwui Enwezor as the museum’s first black curator, but the foundation itself only credits Enwezor as a contributor for its “In/Sight: African Photographers 1940 To The Present” 1996 exhibition in a public press statement. “The late, great Okwui Enwezor was the first Black curator (that I am aware of) to walk through the doors of the Guggenheim,” says LaBouvier. “If only he were here to tell us what happened.”
More recently in May, the Guggenheim worked with seminal Black contemporary artists Carrie Mae Weems and Julie Mehretu as part of what the museum bills as its “first-ever artist-curated exhibition,” entitled “Artistic License.” Although Weems and Mehretu are recognized for their curatorial contributions for the show that took place at the institution’s famous circle-shaped rotunda, they are not organizing an exhibition to the extent of LaBouvier’s forthcoming Basquiat presentation. Some could consider her this institution’s first Black curator or first Black woman curator. “Chaédria’s discovery of Defacement is particularly notable because of its historical significance, and the rarity of works made by Basquiat in response to a specific event,” says Cohen. “I do see Chaédria as the next generation of Basquiat scholars, taking this focus even further in her deep dive in research and analysis on one specific work, contextualized by
other works by Basquiat and his peers.”
“CHAÉDRIA LABOUVIER IS AMONG THE FIRST BLACK CURATORS WHO HAS ORGANIZED AN EXHIBITION AT THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, AND THE FIRST BLACK WOMAN TO BE THE SOLE CURATOR OF A GUGGENHEIM EXHIBITION.”
“Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: The Untold Story”
Ultimately, curator titles given to those who haven’t undergone extensive research on a particular artist, body of work, or field, downplays the legitimacy of traditional curators who devote their entire careers to elevate scholarship on a subject. LaBouvier says that she feels the need to protect her research on Basquiat, but also trust civic institutions such as the Guggenheim to protect her discoveries. “I think a lot of curators feel like they're pregnant, especially when they've been working on something for years,” says LaBouvier. “This thing [Defacement] that I felt I had to protect when other people didn't believe in it and it has this whole life of its own now. This is also part of the Guggenheim's history now. This is a painting that belongs to art history now.”
From her Black solo curator role to Basquiat’s long-awaited entrance at a second major NYC institution, LaBouvier’s Guggenheim show only begins to tackle to the systematic oppression inherent within the fine art world. She says there are institutional obstacles that both Black artists and curators have to overcome first before competing as equals with their white counterparts. “You have these hurdles that Black artists and curators of color have to get through, in terms of canonical and institutional issues, and then you have to get to the logistical questions that everyone in the art world has to face: ‘Can you afford to do this? Do you have the education? Do you have internships?’” she says. “And I think the art world is reflective of just America, in that it is just so sadly and embarrassingly acknowledging or realizing that Black history in all of its forms is also just History, with a capital H.”
LaBouvier’s 15-plus years of research on Basquiat will culminate in the exhibition entitled “Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: The Untold Story” running from June 21 to November 6 at the Guggenheim. Stay tuned for a look inside the exhibition.
Guggenheim
1071 5th Ave
https://view.ceros.com/hype-beast/meet-the-first-black-solo-curator-at-the-guggenheim/p/1
