“She Can’t Drive Forever, and She Shouldn’t Drive.”

Below, you can hear Ashley James, the Black curator that the Guggenheim hired during the Basquiat exhibition, say, “She can’t drive forever, and she shouldn’t.”

James is speaking about me. At this point, she had been at the Guggenheim for a little over two months, but wasted no time in continuing the Guggenheim’s institutional mandate of harming me, my reputation, and lying to the public. When she says that “she” (meaning, me) cannot drive forever, James is referring to the conversation about my experience, the Guggenheim’s historical record, and the public perception. In the tape, James complains about the control that it seems that I have over the Guggenheim’s narrative, and she makes it clear, as does Spector in the leaked audio, that this must be stopped. In the context of the tape, James further details how the Guggenheim can distort the facts and present a public narrative and perception that is more favorable to the museum, using tools such as exhibitions, public programming, her hiring, and the potential hiring of other Black curators. Naomi Beckwith, who took over Spector’s role when she was fired and is Black, was hired in 2020, roughly a few months after this recording took place, and on the heels of a curatorial letter demanding Spector’s resignation that I never asked for, or co-signed. All of the plans that James explicitly mentioned or alluded to have been carried out, or there are plans for them to do so. In the audio, you hear the blueprint that the Guggenheim has followed since 2019. It is horrifying in its transparency to lie and gaslighting.

The press has never stopped transcribing the lie for them.

At this time, I am deciding not to release James’s segment in its seven-minute entirety. This is but a tip of the iceberg of the documented, coordinated, and corroborated attacks, smear and whisper campaigns, public lies and underreporting that were planned and architected because I went public with my experience at the Guggenheim and what I know about the museum, which leads into other things about the museum. It was a concerted effort to silence me, to frame me as “irrational” (direct words of Spector’s) and to essentially bury the story. James also explicitly references the help that the Guggenheim can depend on with other factors in the art world and beyond; it is hard to divorce The Atlantic’s decision to publish a story that they knew was factually incorrect, poorly sourced and vetted, and depended heavily on the un-checked and un-contextualized narrative of Spector, whose statements are incompatible with the evidence. The hit piece that Helen Lewis wrote cannot be divorced from the planning of James, Spector, and the Guggenheim curators, then and now, to wrest control of the narrative from me, and to lie to the public, caught on tape. They are inextricable.

Let it be noted that after James says these words of collusion and conspiracy, Spector says, “thank you.” No one challenges these words.

All of this happened because I wanted to be treated as a human being, I would not lie about the Guggenheim’s institutional history and I would not hand over ownership of my show or scholarship to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. I was a threat because my self-agency is in direct opposition to the lie that the Guggenheim has told, and built upon. And they know, just as much as I do, that what has been built upon is built upon murder, racism, fraud, harassment, masterpieces, (alleged) Nazi loot, Basquiat scholarship, land and history centuries older than the Guggenheim and a curatorial letter that is nothing like what it seems, amongst other things. The Guggenheim took “Basquiat’s Defacement: The Untold Story” to tell what, in an art-historical sense, what happened when the New York Police Department tried to cover-up — a defacement of the truth — what happened to Michael Stewart and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and thought that they could also not talk about their own history. When that was not possible, the Guggenheim did to me what NYPD did to Stewart, and what the art-world did to Basquiat, which was ultimately, defacement of truths.

I want this to really sink in, for you to understand what you are listening to. You are listening to a secret recording of a Black woman, hired to both take credit for my work and historical place, saying that I cannot drive the narrative of what happened to me and my work in the public arena. This Black woman isn’t just saying that I can’t control the narrative of what happened — but that I shouldn’t. That I shouldn’t be believed. And all and any steps should be taken to ensure that that doesn’t happen. And what she’s saying is that if they have to ruin my reputation, present untruths, distort the historical record — they’ll do that. If they have to destroy scholarship to present lies to save the Guggenheim, they’ll do that. If they have to build upon coffins to get Black people and other people of color into the museum to whitewash this scandal, they’ll do that. And her colleagues — also my former colleagues — are agreeing with her through their silence. The woman who hired her, Nancy Spector, is agreeing with her. It shouldn’t be surprised that “The Guggenheim’s Scapegoat”, written by Helen Lewis, is sympathetic to Spector, who stands at the center of the article, and the malestrom. It shouldn’t be a surprise that The Atlantic printed the misinformation that James and Spector said and knew that the press would. It is literal pro-Spector, pro-Guggenheim propaganda.

It’s exactly what they planned, and said and have attempted to execute since it was made clear that I will not lie nor be silent to save them.

What they did not account for was the mountains upon mountains of evidence, or the people who knew that this was wrong and have not let this story go, or the people who recorded this, knowing full well the level of conspiracy and collusion that they were privy to. They did not account for the fact that fans of Basquiat were unwilling to let this story go, nor did they take into account that the public has watched me essentially grow up online, through activism and writing and scholarship, and were waiting for me to speak.