Bluesky

Last winter, more than 100,000 people flocked to New York’s Hudson Yards to visit an extravagant “art amusement park” called Luna Luna. The cavernous Shed hosted the full-scale fairground, which arrived hot from a Los Angeles run, ahead of a planned global tour. Critics cooed over its attractions: a Ferris wheel designed by Jean-Michel Basquiat, a carousel painted by Keith Haring, and carnival-sized works from Roy Lichtenstein, Kenny Scharf, and others. Visitors paid handsomely to attend—timed weekend tickets went for $54 per person, while all-day “Moon Passes” were $94 each—but even VIPs were permitted only to view, not ride, the colorful structures. There was too much at stake: The buoyant, lighthearted exhibition represented nearly $100 million in investment between a consortium of funders led by the rapper Drake.

The brainchild of Austrian artist André Heller, who envisioned a playland bridging high art and youthful wonder, Luna Luna debuted in Hamburg, Germany, in 1987. Though the show was initially successful, funding soon ran out, and the “park” was moved into private storage before being ignominiously consigned to a set of shipping containers in West Texas. It was here that Drake and his team of carneys, confident in the show’s commercial potential, purchased the aging fairground sight unseen. Their gamble wasn’t unreasonable: Basquiat’s work has shattered market records, and the bargain offerings of Haring can trade for millions. Today, the stars of Luna Luna are such big business that it’s difficult to imagine that these artists once struggled to give their work away. But so they did: Basquiat, Haring, and Scharf all began as graffiti artists in Lower Manhattan, tagging streets and subways with pithy dictums and colorful murals.

Aerosol abounds at Luna Luna, where many of the works are spray-painted, and wall copy commemorates the many ties between the exhibition’s stars and graffiti artists like Fab 5 Freddy. As much a temple to graffiti as a high-concept carnival, Luna Luna celebrates the gritty origins of its blue-chip painters, a talented circle of friends who “[broke] down the boundaries between graffiti and the elite art world.” There’s good reason to underline these connections: Graffiti lends something real to the hermetic remove of the gallery world, connoting a certain legitimacy. Exhibitions like Luna Luna embrace—and borrow a certain frisson from—the form’s risk, grit, and illegality. Today this danger can seem a historical footnote, but these risks were once tangible: Artists were regularly chased, arrested, and beaten by police. Haring was often cuffed, and Scharf had a gun stuck in his mouth by officers who caught him tagging. Those men were lucky: They were both white. “If I were Black,” Scharf told the curator Chaédria LaBouvier in 2019, “they would have killed me.”

Another man—another painter and graffiti artist—sits in the shadow of this colorful carnival. Michael Stewart was a peer of Basquiat, Haring, and Scharf, a young painter who ran in the same downtown scene, angling for his own gallery show. “Michael,” observed Haring, “wanted to be like Jean-Michel. He looked like Jean-Michel.” He was even dating Basquiat’s ex-girlfriend. Like many burgeoning artists, Stewart followed a peripatetic trajectory, working service jobs and deejaying, all while painting on the side. But his ambitions were cut short. Early in the morning of September 15, 1983, Stewart was delivered to New York’s Bellevue Hospital by a group of New York City Transit Police officers. He had been arrested for writing graffiti. He was unconscious and badly bruised. He remained in a coma for 13 days, then he died. He was 25 years old.

What, precisely, occurred during the wee hours of that September morning—and why six transit police officers were later acquitted during the trial of their actions—is the subject of Elon Green’s new book, The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart’s New York. For New Yorkers of a certain generation, Stewart’s name will ring familiar: His case was a cause célèbre in a city fiercely divided by matters of race and justice. But his story’s prominence has faded with time, grimly obscured by a seemingly endless list of names lost to racial violence and police brutality. At Luna Luna, attendees are met by an enormous collage of downtown artists and a timeline of events contemporaneous with the show; Stewart’s name and face are nowhere to be found.

Stewart, according to police, was caught red-handed. He’d been writing graffiti inside the First Avenue station of the L train when Officer John Kostick spotted him. “You got me,” Stewart admitted. From here on out, however, every detail is contested. Kostick says that Stewart ran, then tripped and fell on the subway stairs; another witness says Stewart was tackled by Kostick. Stewart was taken to Union Square, a few blocks away, where transit police kept an underground precinct. Here, police allege, Stewart tried to flee and was restrained—without excessive force—by a group of officers. He was then transported to Bellevue. The next day, the papers ran a wire item about a “Brooklyn man who apparently went berserk” and “had to be rushed to a hospital after he lapsed into what is believed to be a drug-induced coma.” This slapdash report, the journalist Murray Kempton later assessed, did not contain a single accurate assertion. What really occurred, Kempton surmised, was closer to “a lynching.”

At least two dozen people living at 31 Union Square West, drawn to their windows by the sound of screams, witnessed something different from the police account. “I have never heard screams like that in my life,” one former resident told Green, “and I hope to never hear screams like that again.” Green’s interviews with the former residents—many of them students living in the building’s New School dorm—are stomach-churning. The residents recall watching as a young Black man was kicked, struck, and kneeled upon by white officers. Soon “the man on the ground…stopped moving.” He was then lifted up and, “in a swinging motion… launched…into the back of the [police] van.” At Bellevue Hospital, the chief medical resident was startled to discover “billy club marks” across the arriving patient’s neck. For almost two weeks, the doctors tried to save a young man who “kept trying to die on us.” On September 28, he was gone.

People under oath—and people in professions that require legal precision—are careful with their words. Nearly every authority figure in Green’s book is circumspect to their core. William Cole, the chief medical resident at Bellevue who observed the billy club marks, admits “there was no smoking gun.” The city’s chief medical examiner, Elliott Gross, informed the press that cardiac arrest had killed Stewart and that “coma occurred incident to the cardiac arrest.” But he would not say what caused the coma. Eventually, he recognized “evidence of injuries which could have been inflicted by fist, by feet, by a nightstick,” but this shift took months. Gross’s temporizing, and his predilection for caution, would prove deadly for the case.

Circumspection aside, there was still enough evidence for District Attorney Robert Morgenthau to indict three officers—John Kostick, Anthony Piscola, and Henry Boerner—on second-degree manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, and lesser charges in June 1984. Nine months had passed since Stewart’s death, and his loss had resonated across the art world. Basquiat, deeply affected by the news, painted a scene of two policemen beating a Black figure on Haring’s studio wall. The work, known as Defacement, was significant enough to Haring that he carved it from his wall and mounted it above his bed. Green cites a telling entry in Andy Warhol’s diary: “Keith said that he’s been arrested by the police four times, but…they just sort of call him a fairy and let him go. But this kid that was killed, he had the Jean Michel look—dreadlocks.” For years after Stewart’s death, Basquiat repeated the same refrain: “It could have been me.”

In a frustrating twist, the initial grand jury trial involving Stewart’s death was dismissed after a rogue juror violated the court’s instructions. Morgenthau went back to the drawing board, empaneled a second grand jury, and reindicted the officers in February 1985. (Three witnessing officers were additionally charged with perjury.) Thanks to the infamous blue wall of silence—those “police officers who saw no evil, heard no evil,” lamented Morgenthau—the district attorney was forced to employ a creative legal strategy. Since no witness could positively identify any single officer who had kicked, choked, or beaten Stewart, Morgenthau indicted all three on a theory of omission: Each man had countenanced Stewart’s death, Morgenthau argued, by virtue of their inaction.

But the case was doomed from the start. Every officer pleaded the Fifth Amendment, which meant that the nearest testifying witnesses had watched bleary-eyed from their windows, multiple stories up. In the courtroom, these witnesses recounted the truth of their memories, a truth of narrative. They spoke with confidence, if not always with certainty; they knew what they saw, but they had trouble providing the kinds of details that, taken together, might comprise the legal truth, a truth beyond a reasonable doubt. Under examination, they floundered: Was it a kick, or a choke, or a club, and how many times? In one particularly odious moment, a defense lawyer mocked, “Was it like the Rockettes? Three police officers next to each other doing the exact kick at the same time?”

Medical experts, meanwhile, could not pinpoint precisely what had killed Stewart. Gross regretted that he could not offer “medical certainty.” The defense reiterated the high burden of proof required in criminal cases, then presented no evidence. All six officers were acquitted.

“In their minds,” Haring wrote in his journal after the trial, “they will never forget. They know they killed him. They will never forget his screams, his face, his blood. They must live with that forever.” Haring conjured this violence in his 1985 painting Michael Stewart — USA for Africa. Four years later, the director Spike Lee paid homage to Stewart in his film Do the Right Thing.

Though poignant, the tributes of Basquiat, Haring, and Lee make it difficult not to wonder: Is there another world in which Michael Stewart’s name might conjure more than memory and homage? One, perhaps, in which he lived long enough to join the artists—so many of his peers—celebrated today at Luna Luna? Stewart’s own amateur paintings and sketches, the gallerist Patrick Fox told LaBouvier, embody a certain “life force.” Their angular slashes and strokes, their colorful flicks of the wrist—which conjure the cuts of Lucio Fontana—evince a man desperately “trying to leave proof of his very existence.”

That existence was still fragile; Stewart was just beginning. The Daily News assessed him as an “unknown model and a would-be artist”—a nobody, in other words. Bleak, if only for the fact that Basquiat, three years before Stewart’s death, was homeless on the Lower East Side. He managed to find his footing; Haring and Scharf would do the same. Cruel, in the case of Michael Stewart, that the next act should never come.