So!

This is my first message to you guys, and I wanted it to be during the holiday season, since it’s a slower, more reflective time.

 Thank you for waiting, and for coming along on the ride. Some of you follow me on Twitter, so you have kind of kept up with my musings, and I’ve shared that I did not want to speak or publish until I felt like that time was right. Meaning, I think socially and politically we’re at a place where we’re more ready to have conversations about some of the topics and themes that I want to discuss: the failures and fallacy of representation/identity politics, fraud, institutions, the failure of legacy media, the role of the public and the art. It’s always for the art, and I can say, for love of the game.

But I also had to wait for people to grow up; I’ve honestly been disheartened and disgusted by the delusion of the last 2-3 years, and I have been privately living through an on-going saga and protecting materials from what is probably one of the biggest art history stories of the last decade.

And we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface.

Instead, I’ve used this time to draft and map out a website and writings. I’ve used this time to check the pulse of where we are – and aren’t – to figure out how and what to say that’s relevant to the story of curating Basquiat, and the larger world that we’re in, and moving into. It felt wrong to pretend that we haven’t fallen off a cliff, and it wasn’t a message that I could speak to, the delusion.

We’ll get to that soon enough.

 In the interim – because there are 12 days of Christmas – I wanted to share one of my favorite images of Christmas.

In 1987, Keith Haring dressed up as Santa Claus and was photographed by the late Marcus Leatherdale. I’m obviously publicly associated with Jean-Michel Basquiat, but I am also a specialist of Keith Haring’s work. The research for Haring was always alongside Basquiat’s, from the very beginning. The scholarship would have never been possible or complete without inquiry into Haring’s, especially for the 2019 exhibition, “Basquiat’s Defacement: The Untold Story”. I have about 20 years of unpublished scholarship on Haring, ebbing and flowing out of first observations in the humble basement of the now-demolished Sawyer Library at Williams College.

What I’ve always loved about Leatherdale’s image was that it captured how young Haring was. I’ve been looking at this image ever since my late teens? With time, I understand, gosh, they were so young, all of them. Haring was still very much a kid, not even 30 here. He loved children, spectacle and Christmas, hip-hop, sneakers; all of that’s here. Leatherdale’s choice of sepia contribute time-less (not quite the same as “timeless”) to the image that makes for a fun contrast; the shoes, even Haring’s slimness very much root the image in the contemporal of the late 80s, the late 20th century, even contemporary art itself. The choice of sepia does a few things: it not-so subtly links Leatherdale back to Robert Mapplethorpe, the foremost living (White) photographer at that time, and for whom he was once a studio manager for. One thing that I love about the artists of the 1980s is how fleeting they felt and sensed their time was, and wasted none of it. They’ve been penalized for that grafting — an eagerness, earnestness — that I believe to be misplaced and wrongly interpreted. We’ll discuss some of that in 2025 as well. You can read more about Marcus Leatherdale here.  

There’s a tremendous lesson in that, and one that I’ve been lucky to learn from these artists for most of my life. I hope that my work in 2025 does those artists and those lessons fair justice.

Thank you again for coming along with me on the ride. It will have been worth the wait.

And on that note, I leave you with my top 11 kind-of Christmas movies that I’ll be watching through the rest of Christmas season. xx

Chaédria