Before Black Lives Matter: Exhibition pays tribute to an earlier NYPD killing of unarmed black man by alexnazaryan
NEW YORK — He danced in Madonna’s first music video, “Everybody.” Tall and handsome, he did some modeling for the designer Dianne Brill, who was close to Andy Warhol. But his true passion was art, and so Michael Stewart was studying at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In the early morning hours of Sept. 15, 1983, Stewart was returning to that borough, where he had been born and raised, after spending the evening with friends in Manhattan.
Story continuesThe show comes amid a broader reassessment of recent American culture, the 1980s in particular. This spring, director Ava DuVernay’s miniseries “When They See Us” offered a reassessment of the five young black men wrongly convicted of raping a jogger in Central Park in 1989. At the time, Donald Trump called for those young men, known as the Central Park Five, to be put to death. He has recently defended doing so, arguing that “you have people on both sides of that.
Stewart was largely forgotten, as the names of other black victims of racism overtook his own: Michael Griffiths, Yusuf Hawkins, Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima, Sean Bell. Meanwhile, Basquiat’s stock has only kept rising, culminating in the $110 million sale of one of his paintings two years ago. “Defacement,” the painting now on display at the Guggenheim, was reportedly loaned to the museum by the musician and entrepreneur Jay-Z .
“It’s almost as if God keeps giving us the same scenario and waiting for us to get it right,” says Hawk Newsome, a leader of Black Lives Matter in New York who grew up in the city in the 1990s. Much as he believes in the value of activism, Sharpton admits that the biggest victory for social justice in law enforcement has been the advent of the body camera, which officers in New York and many other municipalities are now required to wear. “We didn’t have a tape with Michael Stewart,” he says, contrasting that with video of the Garner killing taken by bystander Ramsey Orta. “This is on tape — choking him.
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