Title: Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart) - Wikipedia
Headings: Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart)
Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart)
Contents
Background
Analysis
Exhibitions
See also
References
Further reading

Content: While Stewart was still in a coma, artist David Wojnarowicz created a flyer for a rally protesting Stewart's then "near-murder" in Union Square on September 26, 1983. The flyer portrays the officers with skeletal faces beating a handcuffed black man with batons. It was taped all around downtown which may have inspired Basquiat's Defacement painting. In the years since Defacement was created, it has taken critical resonance with the Black Lives Matter movement. Exhibitions
Defacement was never sold and it's seldom displayed in public. It is owned by Nina Clemente, Keith Haring's goddaughter and daughter of the Italian painter Francesco Clement. In 2016, Chaédria LaBouvier, an independent curator, partnered with her alma mater Williams College Museum of Art in Massachusetts to bring the painting to the campus. It hung in the Reading Room, which is part of the college's first library. In 2019, LaBouvier organized Basquiat's 'Defacement': The Untold Story at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.