How Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring Forged a Friendship While Protesting the Killing of Michael Stewart

At twenty-five years old, Michael Stewart was a young Black aspiring artist, deejay, and model, looking to make a name for himself in the vibrant downtown art scene of early 1980’s New York City. On September 15, 1983, witnesses say they saw him being brutally beaten by New York City Transit Authority police for allegedly tagging a 14th Street subway station wall. Witnesses reported officers beating him with billy clubs and choking him with a nightstick. Stewart arrived at Bellevue Hospital hog-tied with no heartbeat and died after thirteen days in a coma. This was, at that point, the most widely noticed act of police brutality in the city’s history. [All officers charged in Stewart’s death were acquitted.]

Jean-Michel Basquiat was shocked by the beating of Michael Stewart. Known to have used the D train as a canvas, the handsome, dreadlocked Basquiat was aware that his fortunes and Michael’s could easily have been swapped. The artist didn’t need to write on subway tile to catch the attention of police; one summer morning, back in their SAMO days, Basquiat and Al Díaz were drunk and chucking bottles when two rookie officers approached and asked the teenagers to produce their draft cards. It was a joke, apparently, and eventually the police let them be. But the possibility of violence was quite real. That understanding may have fueled a Basquiat painting completed in early October, grappling with the ferocious treatment of Black men at the hands of police.

Basquiat had depicted the armed agents of the city before. Coming off New York/New Wave, a February 1981 group exhibition at P.S. 1 that put the painter in the company of, among others, Warhol, Maripol, and William Burroughs—“a coalition of punks,” as one critic put it—Basquiat convinced gallerist Annina Nosei to let him participate in a show she was planning. In advance of the exhibit, Nosei gave the artist use of the two-thousand-square-foot studio space in the basement of her Prince Street gallery. (The implications of a white woman installing a Black man in her “underground lair,” as Fab 5 Freddy described the arrangement, didn’t sit well with some of Basquiat’s friends.)

Working in Nosei’s studio, Basquiat completed La Hara, a depiction of a red-eyed white policeman, and Irony of a Negro Policeman, an acrylic and oil stick work depicting a Black lawman in uniform. The latter was displayed in Nosei’s exhibition Public Address in October 1981, which placed Basquiat’s work alongside that of contemporaries Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and Keith Haring.

It wasn’t just the police and their attendant cruelties that interested the young painter. Basquiat had read Gray’s Anatomy as a kid and admired Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawing Study of Arms. Basquiat’s Back of the Neck, a painting begun the next year, depicted the police’s frequent targets, stripped down to their basic form. Using lines of white, yellow, and red against a black background, the artist showed a spine, a neck, and an arm positioned at a ninety-degree angle, in the style, perhaps, of a “Gable Grip,” a choke hold used by police. The gallerist Nosei could see that, while only twenty, Basquiat already had a fully formed social conscience, so she wasn’t surprised by the unapologetically critical interpretation of law enforcement. The work wasn’t just about color or design, she marveled decades later; it was about ideas.

Basquiat heard about Michael’s hospitalization during a night out at the Roxy. In the middle of the dance floor, a man approached him and whispered the news in his ear. The artist, who once estimated that his work was “about 80% anger,” reacted with passionate intensity. Later, he drew black skulls in crayon on paper on the floor of a girlfriend’s apartment. He was so angry, he punctured the paper.

When Michael died, Basquiat went to Haring’s Houston Street studio. The two had known each other since meeting years earlier at the School of Visual Arts. Haring, a student there, helped Basquiat get past a troublesome security guard. Later that day, Haring saw SAMO tags all over the SVA walls and realized he’d hung out with the elusive artist.

At the time, the two ran in different circles. Haring, skinny and ebullient, was drawn to graffiti, a form from which Basquiat, a more pensive personality, was starting to distance himself. All the same, there were vital commonalities. Patrick Fox, who knew both men, likened Basquiat to a lion and Haring to a panther—they were, he thought, “different beasts, but in the same jungle.” There was, too, a shared work ethic. As one curator put it, these were “manic draughtsmen who drew constantly, whether in the studio, on trips or at the homes of friends and acquaintances.”

They became good friends.

It was, therefore, not a surprise when Basquiat, that fall day in 1983, left a finished painting on Haring’s drywall: a silhouetted Black figure bookended by pink-faced, club-wielding police in blue uniforms. Then he left the city, off to Europe for a couple of weeks with Andy Warhol.

According to Warhol, while they were in Milan, Basquiat said he wanted to commit suicide. Warhol, by his own account, responded to this confession of desperation with a laugh, telling his friend he needed to get some sleep.

From Milan, Basquiat traveled to Madrid, where he met up with Haring.

When Haring returned to New York, he sat for a conversation with Rene Ricard. A poet and critic, Ricard had a gift for identifying the era’s great talents. In 1981, he contemplated the new landscape in an Artforum essay titled “The Radiant Child” and deemed Haring and Basquiat its brightest stars. Nearly two years later, Ricard and Haring recording the conversation—although to what end isn’t clear. Possibly they were filling time until the arrival of a photographer sent to shoot Haring for an issue of People.

The men, comfortable with each other, skittered from topic to topic. They talked about the type of black ink Haring was using in his art, which he’d liked enough to purchase while on a trip to Tokyo. Haring also delighted in a recent issue of the Morning Call sent by his mother in Pennsylvania, where he’d grown up. The newspaper profiled the artist, running a photo of him, hands in his pockets, posed in front of one of his own murals. Haring noticed something that tickled him.

“They used this photo of me standing in front of this drawing that has this huge dick on it. I can’t believe how huge this dick is, but it’s lost in all these other lines,” he said. “I’m sure they didn’t see it.” The penis was unmistakably in the upper right-hand corner of the mural. But it was difficult to spot; even the reporter, who made the trek from Pennsylvania to interview Haring in his studio, had been unaware of the image’s hidden member.

Ricard asks if Haring’s mom noticed the massive penis.

“They didn’t say anything about it,” the artist said of his parents. “They stopped talking about sex a long time ago.”

Ricard looked at a painting on tarpaulin Haring had done earlier in the year. It was of Mickey Mouse and E.T., both respectably erect, the extraterrestrial preparing to penetrate the eager mouse.

The Spielberg creation, Ricard observed, “has an enormous dick.” “It can extend like his neck, you know in the movie, when . . .” Ricard had not seen the movie, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. “. . . his neck up in the air, the same thing happens . . . he’s gotta have a big dick to fuck Mickey Mouse.”

“What’s coming out of his asshole?” Ricard asked.

“Those are farts,” said Haring, who as a child had loved to draw Mickey. Ricard brought up Warhol, whose fondness for both Haring and Basquiat was well known. “You and Jean are his two favorite artists,” the critic said. “I think Jean is a terrible bore.” Ricard gossiped about Basquiat paying Warhol thousands of dollars a month to live in his carriage house.

“I don’t think that’s what’s keeping him,” said Haring, likely somewhat jealous of Basquiat’s arrangement with Warhol.

“Oh, no?” Ricard said. “Andy is very polite. If he’s going to keep a boy, the boy is going to pay for it.”

Haring acknowledged that this was probably true. But, he said, “I don’t want to be kept by anybody.”

Ricard said that, initially, he hadn’t understood Basquiat’s work. It wasn’t in the graffiti style.

Haring noted that Basquiat spent his entire life in New York, while he himself didn’t arrive until 1978. “I thought it would have been real tacky to come and copy something that I really knew nothing about.”

“Graffiti is just that,” Ricard said. “It’s the New York school.”

Haring seemed to agree. “I can see—when I see mothers with little babies on the train, and the baby’s eyes are going all over the place. That’s where graffiti really starts from. You see the shit when you’re six months old, on a train, riding a train. Your eyes go all over the place. There’s no way I could start doing graffiti now. . . . It’s too late. I can’t learn that. It comes from seeing it from the time when you’re born until the time when you’re in school.” (An odd assertion, as Haring had taken to the medium with great success.)

Haring and Ricard talked about the mayor’s latest sally in his war against graffiti. Ricard observed, “He was on television a couple of weeks ago talking about graffiti, and how much he hates it.”

It was perhaps inevitable that Michael’s death would come up, as it was on the mind of both men. That day, in fact, Ricard, joined by Edit DeAk and Diego Cortez, met with the Stewarts’ attorneys to discuss [New York City chief medical examiner Elliot] Gross’s conduct during Michael’s autopsy. As for Haring, not long ago, he’d gone with Michael to a graffiti-related event on Central Park West. Afterward, during the taxi ride downtown, he and Michael talked about how stupid it had been.

Like much of the neighborhood, Haring attended the Union Square protest and had, in the subsequent weeks, kept an obsessive eye on the case’s developments. He’d even done a drawing about the incident, depicting a man hanging upside down, legs bound, being beaten. Haring was hesitant to draw images like this, he told Ricard. “Those people are still out there. They’re not locked up,” he said of the police. For this reason, Haring believed that work depicting Michael would put him in a vulnerable position.

Ricard noted that, in cases such as Michael’s beating, it was far easier for white New Yorkers to stick their necks out than it was for Black New Yorkers, for whom it was “so close to home.”

As it happened, Ricard had just talked about Michael’s case with Basquiat during a visit, but not for long. As the critic recalled, the painter believed Michael “should be let to rest in peace.” Ricard, though, felt that someone who died so violently could not rest in peace. Indeed, he told Haring, the reason for laws is to slake society’s “vengeance for crime, just to ensure, in fact, that people’s souls do rest.”

Haring believed that Basquiat felt otherwise because, to some degree, Michael had been emulating the painter the night he was arrested. “I mean, Michael wanted to be like Jean-Michel,” Haring said. He felt Michael Stewart’s case had drawn attention primarily because of his proximity to the downtown scene. “He looked like Jean-Michel. He was Jean-Michel’s only real serious girlfriend’s new boyfriend.”

From The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart‘s New York by Elon Green. Copyright (c) 2025 by the authors and reprinted with permission of Celadon Books, a division of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.

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