Here is a screenshot of a loan letter that went out to a collector for Basquiat’s “Defacement”: The Untold Story. Spector and the Guggenheim habitually misrepresented my work and scholarship. The contract did not list her or Joan Young as co-curators, because it was understood that the Guggenheim did not fund my work, nor did it have the expertise to do anything more than support my making the exhibition. The framing of this suggests that the scholarship is Spector and Young’s work, despite it all being built on my original scholarship. This framing had to be changed because it misrepresented the copyright, and thus, who the curator was. As the person who created the concept of the exhibition, helmed the show, wrote the catalogue, and produced the scholarship that the catalogue and exhibition were foundationed upon, I was the curator. In the art world, “curator” implies all of those responsibilities; if you share them, then your collaborators are “co-curators."

People within the field began whispering about this line of the loan letter, because they knew it was my scholarship. The Guggenheim was representing the work as though it was theirs, which was a red flag for those who were interested in supporting the next generation of scholarship. The curator of the exhibition is always mentioned first when discussing the credit line. Spector was told this, and continued to erase me anyway.

The Guggenheim actively continues to misrepresent my work, claiming that it was weak while trying to claim ownership of it.