Consider the following facts as you wend your way through the Guggenheim Museum and its uppermost gallery, where you will presently find a painting called The Death of Michael Stewart (1983), Jean-Michael Basquiat’s gut-punching tribute to a slain artist, and the centerpiece for an exhibition that could hardly be more timely. Black people are three times more likely to be killed by police than white people. In 2014, fewer than one in three black people killed by police in the United States were suspected of a violent crime and allegedly armed. As American pediatrician Dr Benjamin Spock once observed, “Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.”

Such brutality is the focal point for “Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: The Untold Story,” an exhibition curated by Chaédria LaBouvier that commences from a painting created by Jean-Michel Basquiat in honor of a young, black artist — Michael Stewart — who met his tragic end when he was supposedly caught by the New York City Transit Police tagging a wall in an East Village subway station during the early morning hours of September 15, 1983. Exactly what transpired that night remains unsettled to this day, but what is known is that the twenty-five-year-old Stewart was handcuffed, beaten, and strangulated by a choke hold with a nightstick — likely causing a massive brain hemorrhage, whereby he fell into a coma and never regained consciousness, dying two weeks later.

Other artists, among them Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, responded to Stewart’s death with commemorative works of their own, which are featured in the exhibition. Also included is a yellow flyer created by David Wojnarowicz — portraying the officers with vicious, skeletal faces — to announce a September 26, 1983, rally in Union Square in protest of Stewart’s “near-murder,” when the young man was still languishing in a coma, “suspended between life and death.” In fact, Basquiat must have seen Wojnarowicz’s poster (which was taped “all over” downtown, as another artist recalls), and apparently it served as a direct source for the composition of Basquiat’s painting.