Above is a quick video from my archive of some of the land in Texas’s Hill Country that my family owns. We have been in the area for close to 200 years, and still maintain a working ranch that is nearly as old. (As anyone in farming/ranching knows, to break even is a blessing.) Through my maternal grandmother, I am a descendant of two families who helped establish the states of Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, Connecticut and New York. These families are the Craytons and the Nichols. What a great irony for a woman that The Atlantic wrote about whom they just flatly described as “born in Texas”. I was not born in Texas; I am Texas.
The idea that Spector plucked me out of obscurity and taught me the ways of research and curating are laughably untrue, and speak more to Spector’s, Lewis’s and The Atlantic’s need for her to be a White savior in a story that in predates her, the Guggenheim and The Atlantic by centuries. For example: The Atlantic was founded in 1857; the Craytons arrived to Texas in 1838-9 after roughly a century in Tennessee, and the Nichols came in 1836, after first arriving in Connecticut in 1635/6. To have told the truth would’ve upended Spector’s role as the benevolent White Jewish woman who brought in a young Black woman, and mentored her and taught her everything that she knew. This is further complicated — and Lewis’s ignorance further enhanced — when one considers that I am also of Jewish descent through my Cuban maternal grandfather, and Spector knew this. In fact, during the making of the exhibition, my Jewish heritage was absolutely weaponized against me, when I did not conform to Spector’s expectations of what that looked like. (I am Black, not mixed-race, and please do not refer to me as such.)
The enormity of that history is for another time, but it has everything to do with how I became a Basquiat specialist so early in my career, why the Guggenheim hired a 33 year-old with flawless scholarship, why they could not claim copyright rights over my work, why Nancy Spector said that the museum was looking for “an aristocrat”, and why when I did not allow the Guggenheim the control over my narrative or my work, they perpetuate a lie that they “discovered” me, I was Spector’s ungrateful mentee, and that she plucked me from nowhere. The Guggenheim had no experience working with a Black curator helming an exhibition; it was me who was mentoring them. It was the enormity of those facts that emboldened the lie, as the saying goes, the more outrageous the lie, the more believable it is. The Guggenheim tried to deface not only Basquiat scholarship, New York City history, but Texas and American history in the process.
In lieu of fact checking, or an interview from me, Helen Lewis at best, published a piece that not only published rumor as fact, it, at its worst, took the word of Nancy Spector, a woman who has organized whisper campaigns, smear campaigns on the Guggenheim’s dime (with their cooperation of course), and other means to discredit and distort my personal and professional reputation. Spector has proven time and time again, to be unable to face her racism and her failings as a curator and museum executive— which is partly why she was “asked” to step down — and has, continued to, for years, to orchestrate, cooperate and inform misinformation campaigns like “The Guggenheim’s Scapegoat”. The blogpost, as compromised as it is, would’ve been impossible for a writer of Lewis’s limited social network and journalism skills to have gotten the people to speak to her without Spector’s permission and assistance. It continues the unhinged campaigns of misinformation and harassment and racial terrorizing that she organized, condoned and ideated during her time at the Guggenheim.
It’s egregious that The Atlantic would even think that they were publishing an untold story about how a White woman was being railroaded by her former place of employment, and the “unknown”, “ungrateful” Black woman she took under her wing. The entire framing reeks of White saviorism, dependent on the trope of the “angry Black woman” intimidating the 4’11’’ (how does Lewis know Spector’s height, but not mine?) Jewish woman, and heavy on the unknown part.The Atlantic’s editors, doing their part to discredit me, entrusted a London-based, noted transphobic writer with noted disdain for Black women to perpetuate the myth that I was “unknown”, when my family has been apart of the archives and the story of the United States for close to 400 years. White people (and others invested in Whiteness) do this when they think you come from nothing, belong to no one, and they can write you out of history as quickly as they think that they let you stand in the back of The Important Room. White people do this when they think that they make you. Pathetic stuff, Goldberg. Pathetic stuff.
One side of my family, the Craytons, helped establish the Austin area, and established the town which became Martindale, selling the land to the Martindale family, who became the town’s namesake. Through my grandmother, I am a part of the Crayton and Nichols families, who are considered to be a ranching dynasty for Black Texas ranchers, for their history of cattle ranching that goes back to the 1700s at least, horse breeding and breaking, military service which goes back to the 1600s, and their legacy of a number of my grandmother’s uncles and great-uncles, who were original Chisholm Trail cowboys. They in part learned the horse and cowboy trades from their Native relatives, some of whom were a part of the Tonkawa tribe, considered some of the best horsepeople of that part of the South, alongside the Comanche. The cemeteries where Bruce and other relatives are buried is still held privately by our family, and are historically protected as Texas landmarks, as well as parts of the town that they established. Upon my grandmother’s death in September 2021 and Alison Tudor’s, the historian who worked with my family for 20 years, in November of the same year, I became a steward of these lands, to protect and ensure for the next 200 years, and generations to come until it all falls into the Gulf. In a sense, my Night’s Watch has begun, and will conclude, like my grandmother, my great-grandmother, my great-great grandmother and so on, upon my death.
That is a level of generational care, expertise, training that supersedes what the academy can teach, or what the Guggenheim or The Atlantic can grasp. The schools, internships, research fellowships, etc were just finishing touches. “Basquiat’s Defacement: The Untold Story” was stunning and flawless because I was working with centuries as a guide, medium and teacher, and my courage, confidence and conviction to stand my ground has been literally bred and willed into me. You cannot teach this. It is either in you, or it is not. I was light years ahead of the Guggenheim, Spector and everyone else and they knew it. And they know it still, which is why an entire field, the press, a museum and the art-world have all been invested in the silencing of my voice. I am a giant in the field, and I am a giant because I come from a legion of them of them first. Simply, in the art world, there is me, then there is them. And they hate me for it, because I represent everything that they say that they are, and are not. I do not need to be grateful to be in the room; all things considered, I have been extremely restrained and generous given the levels of subsidies me and my family have provided through funded work and political activism, and the absolute disrespect, bullying, lies, harassment, envy and hate that I have been subjected to, because people who are first generation everything (third at best) decided to ration what they thought I should have. To be clear: all of this shit is mine. You are giving me nothing. I worked for it, fought for it, bled for it and we paid every cost that it takes to stay for centuries, and last.
Below is an excerpt from an interview with one of my grandmother’s great-uncles. Bruce, born in the 1890s, was one of the last of the original Chisholm Trail cowboys left when he passed in 1983.
My family, from multiple branches and family trees have been studied and documented for close to 500 years, when the Nichols branches are factored in. And this is just my mother’s family, I have not even addressed my father’s trees, or the Allens, for instance, who are one of the oldest Black ranching families in Texas as well. My grandmother, Viola, was one of the family archivists, and she was from whom I first learned to take oral stories into the archive and respect them as history. My grandmother learned from her grandmother, and tended an archive that in some instances, is 400 years old; Viola was my first mentor, and the one who trained me the longest and the best. To position Nancy Spector as my mentor is an insult to her, when Viola’s work and money subsidized a museum, the Black women who came after me who signed up to discredit and harm my reputation, the so-called “revolution” of 2020, and a White woman who tried to destroy her granddaughter, an archive, the Basquiat field, the family land and ranch that underscores it all. It was inconceivable for someone like Lewis, who didn’t even know I was born in Dallas, to fathom that there are Black people who have entire histories and self-perception outside of Whiteness. The Atlantic seems to agree with her. Like Spector and the Guggenheim, they had no experience with the history of the South that I represented: the Deep South, a complex, Black and multi-racial history from the people who stayed, who wrote, kept and tended to the history books that the United States tried to erase, ban and burn. The Atlantic should be embarrassed that they even though they were fit to write my name. But that would requite consciousness, and we would not be here if they exhibited this at all. So.
We, the Black sides of the Crayton and Nichols familes, have had help maintaining our archives and cemeteries throughout the years by a number of historians, and the Heritage Association of San Marcos has worked with my family for decades. In fact, here is a screenshot of the late historian and archivist Alison Tudor, a well-respected member of the Heritage Association and specialist of cemeteries and Texas Hill Country history, walking in the cemetery that had been her special project for 20 years. I am filming her, as she told me about her favorite gravestones.
Members of our family, as documented by Bruce Crayton’s own mouth, have been asked to speak to historians of Texas and the South, as these branches of our family have long been known to have help establish the state of Texas (and other states) as a colonial enterprise. This is to say nothing of the contribution that Black Cowboys like Bruce made to the economic machine of the North, leading cattle to Kansas City, and sometimes even travelling to New York City. Cowboys are a forgotten factor of the Industrial Revolution, and even their contribution to World War I, which Bruce and his brothers fought in, serving a country that did not deserve them in Germany. But this historical significance is not lost to historians, which would’ve been totally out of range for The Atlantic to comprehend. The Craytons are of interest to historians because the family tree is a mix of White, Black and Native people — the latter who helped establish the Craytons as some of the best cowboys working due to their skill breaking in wild horses — and one of the family cemeteries is thought to be the oldest private cemetery in Texas that is specifically deeded to be multi-racial. This particular cemetery was established in the late 1860s.
To have so intentionally misrepresented me, The Atlantic meant to perpetuate a myth that Black people have no history, story or agency until White people say so. The Atlantic meant to concretize a myth that Black people owe their existence, history and narrative to the moment when White people recognize them. This was no mistake; this was a concerted effort to help the Guggenheim solidify a narrative that they “created” me, and I was being ungrateful, and my work and expertise only began the moment that Spector “found” me. The Atlantic was in no way hiding their aim to re-affirm White supremacy; there are too many mistakes, too many holes, too many claims which do not hold up against actual fact checking. They underestimated me because they in general, underestimate Black people. But I suppose when your publication is only 165 years old, you make these sorts of rookie mistakes.
The publishing of tabloid propoganda masquerading as researched or even slightly factual is a dangerous thing to normalize, because you cannot tell the story of how the scholarship of Defacement came to be, and what happened at the Guggenheim without understanding that this land not only helped pay for my work, it has subsidized — and continues to — the Guggenheim, and the art-world at large. Bruce Crayton — who stewarded the land, and kept it viable so that it could be a resource for our family — and his work continues to subsidize the Black people who turned George Floyd’s murder into a job fair, the cosmetic change of regime at the Guggenheim, and the art world that benefitted from my scholarship and activism. There is no story of the art world “reckoning” without discussing my exhibition. It wasn’t just George Floyd that galvanized art workers; it was because six months prior, I showed that an institution can be and should be, publicly challenged. This confidence, courage and trust in myself and work had everything to do with the fact that because I came from this family, this line, I was not willing to accept the second class citizenship, humiliation and abuse that so many art workers, especially Black art workers, asked, expected and tried to bully me into accepting. Because I have self-dignity, I stood up, something that more of them should have done. This is a tremendous debt that my family did not ask to pay, that entire museums, the Black curatorial ranks that floated on 2020 for jobs, galleries, and other opportunities are literally standing upon. You cannot talk about 2020 without talking about the 184 year-old ranch that they all have used to open doors that they simply did not work for, and this debt is due. With interest.
The Atlantic erased nearly 200 years of Black Texas ranching history, and another two centuries of American history because they could not admit that a White woman from London with no expertise, a history of racism and hatred was not qualified to grasp the multitudes of this story, or the fact that the Black woman she was writing about was an institution within herself, older than the Guggenheim and The Atlantic, combined. The Atlantic needed to be White more than they needed to get the story right.
