The Guggenheim exhibition has achieved for Basquiat’s Defacement (1983) a level of relevance achieved by few paintings: a memorial to violence with potency to comment on our current social crisis.

Picasso’s Guernica and Goya’s Third of May 1808 belong to a rare class of paintings that have the ability to draw emotions even from people who do not ordinarily respond to works of art. Such paintings have become memorials of traumatic events as much as monuments and offer an immersion in the milieu of devastated cultures as they deal with the aftermath. Basquiat’s Defacement (1983), otherwise known as The Death of Michael Stewart, belongs to this class of painting. It was painted on the wall of Keith Haring’s studio a week after the New York City Police killed Michael Stewart after allegedly tagging a wall in a subway station. Scrawls depict two policemen beating the head of black man with orange truncheons. Like Guernica, it bears aesthetics that interpret the trauma depicted. Basquiat’s defacement of the surface reports on actual defacement or violence that silences people of color. Haring arranged to have it cut out of his wall and displayed in an ornate gold-leaf frame after Basquiat’s death. It’s the size two broadsheets spread out. While we see only nascent codices, which Basquiat would develop in later works, there is an anthropological sense in the painting that succeeds in uniting racially motivated police brutality in the 1980s with the current crisis articulated by Black Lives Matter movement. The exhibition has managed to make something whole out of grief with the cathartic gesture of recollecting the solidarity of other artists through their paintings and prints aside from ephemera related to Stewart’s death: Haring’s Michael Stewart—USA for Africa (1985); Andy Warhol’s screen printed “headline” painting from 1983 incorporating a New York Daily News article on Stewart’s death; David Hammons’s stenciled print The Man Nobody Killed (1986): George Condo’s Portrait of Michael Stewart (1983) and Lyle Ashton Harris’s self-portrait Saint Michael Stewart (1994). Just as the earliest memorials were built by gathering rough stones in a mound, the exhibition summons the sorrows of a community as a model of defiance from our current oppression.