“…And Swerves to Form a Crown of Dreadlocks, a Hip-Hop Halo”

Above is excerpt from a draft of Spector’s essay. The Stewart family and I had to intervene and edit her essay, many edits that she was resistant to. Here she described Michael Stewart’s locs as a “hip-hop halo,” (hip-hip was a typo on her part, but she in off-line drafts, it reads “hip hop halo”) making an irrelevant and racist correlation of his hairstyle as relating to hip-hop, which she codes as “Black” without explanation or supporting evidence.

Spector kept her drafts from me, and I was not privy to her editing process. This is a red flag; Spector was not the curator of the show, had no experience with curating Black artists, Basquiat or even artists in the same canon as Haring and did no interviews with the Stewart family. As the curator of the exhibition and author of the catalogue, Spector should have been in consistent touch about the journey of her essay, which she refused to do. I, however, was subjected to edits that were so extreme and ridiculous that I had to call in a group of three art historians with relevant experience to edit the catalogue. They were thanked in the catalogue, but in actuality, they should’ve been given an editing credit. When I asked for this to happen, this was denied by Spector and Joan Young, her assistant.

It was only by denying the Guggenheim signed releases and reminding them that they were using my copyright without permissions and other releases, that I was able to see exactly what she had written. A great deal of Spector’s essay was taken, both in written form and ideologue, from unpublished works of mine that in November 2018, she and Murphy had deemed “not legible”. It was surprising to see those same ideas, and in some cases words, re-appear in her essay. In withholding essays, I was able to fight for the edits of my book, and prevent Spector from publishing highly racist material like “hip-hop halo” to describe Stewart’s hair. It reveals an institutional anti-Blackness and ignorance that this went unchecked and unchallenged until the Guggenheim was forced to hand over her essay, and contend with the realities of the copyright and my professional responsibility as the curator.

Spector constantly tried to exert curatorial control over an exhibition that was not hers, and was deferred to, even when it was clear that she was endangering the show. This continued the power dynamic of White curators, editors and a museum run by White people who were not fluent in Blackness on an serious or scholastic level, attempting to have the final word about a highly nuanced chapter of art history which demanded an expert level of pop-culture, contemporary Black culture and art history, which Spector and her team simply did not. Their experience in curating siloed chapters of White art history — for instance, the Guggenheim’s collection is built on Modernism, with which they have never dialogued with the Black contributors and influence of that movement in any redemptive way — simply was not enough to pull off a Basquiat exhibition at this level. Rather than admit that, I was subjected to retaliation, a rumor mill about my expertise which has never stopped, and ultimately, leadership from the all ranks of the Guggenheim that attempted to throw the exhibition and its curator into the incinerator. Basquiat’s Defacement: The Untold Story’s place in art history is such that the public, scholars and the press continue to return to understand how and why the Guggenheim got it so wrong.

This was one of the many issues with her citations, writing and over all scholastic practices which I habitually brought up to the Guggenheim, and these were routinely ignored or met with institutional violence in the forms of retaliation, sabotage, disrespect and other forms of harm.