Legacy

A couple of months ago I met my friend Heidi (who I often refer to as “my sibling loss friend Heidi”) and her sister, Rebecca, for dinner in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, where I live. They were going to an art show beforehand, in the neighborhood—Chelsea is small gallery mecca—and invited me to go, too. But I had to bring Luke to the orthodontist (such is my life) so we settled on the dinner plan instead.

They were already at the restaurant when I got there. There’s a law of lateness, at least for me, that basically says the closer something is to me the closer I’ll cut it getting there on time. I.e….I was ten minutes late. Before I could even sit down, Heidi said “You have GOT to see this show.”

It wasn’t because of the art, though it was, by their account, amazing. It was because, they said, the exhibit was also a sibling loss story.

Heidi and Rebecca lost their brother, Scott, to a car accident about as long ago as I lost Ted. Their family founded and runs a foundation, Open to Hope, geared toward helping people through loss. And Heidi is a therapist who specializes in traumatic loss. She also teaches classes related to grief and traumatic loss at Columbia University’s school of social work. I tell you this by way of introducing her and Rebecca, but also by way of saying they know a sibling loss story when they see one.

The exhibit was of the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose work I did not know but all my friends who know art do—in the way people know Warhol and Van Gogh. Which is to say, the guy is pretty famous and I just don’t know the art world very well.

My inexpert summation, largely based on Google and info on the exhibit’s website is that Basquiat was born in Brooklyn in 1960 to a Haitian father and mother of Puerto Rican descent. He was a precocious and prolific artist, even as a kid, and his work ranges from the personal to political.

Because I know that description is inadequate, and I have zero experience describing art, and I’m new to his work, I’m going to lean hard on Wikipedia and the exhibit’s website for a better description…

From Wikipedia:

Basquiat first achieved fame as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, alongside Al Diaz, writing enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of Manhattan's Lower East Side during the late 1970s, where rap, punk, and street art coalesced into early hip-hop music culture. By the early 1980s, his paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. At 21, Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever take part in documenta in Kassel. At 22, he was one of the youngest to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial in New York. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his artwork in 1992.

Basquiat's art focused on dichotomies such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. He appropriated poetry, drawing, and painting, and married text and image, abstraction, figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique. He used social commentary in his paintings as a tool for introspection and for identifying with his experiences in the Black community, as well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism. His visual poetics were acutely political and direct in their criticism of colonialism and support for class struggle.

From the exhibit (entitled King Pleasure) website:

King Pleasure contains “200 never-before-seen and rarely shown paintings, drawings, multimedia presentations, ephemera, and artifacts tell the story of Jean Michel from an intimate perspective, intertwining his artistic endeavors and his personal life, influences, and the times in which he lived.”

I’m back…

Here’s where the sibling loss piece comes in. Basquiat died of a heroin overdose in 1988, at 27, leaving his family, which included his father, mother, and two younger sisters, bereft and with the hefty responsibility of managing the legacy he left behind. And when I say legacy, I mean not only his art, which was tremendous, but his imprint on their lives.

His mother, per Wikipedia, suffered from a mental illness and began living in institutions when he was about ten. I can’t tell if she is still alive or not. His father managed his estate and work until he died, fairly recently. There’s a plaque on the wall in the exhibit somewhere which, I think, sorta speaks to his father managing the actual estate Basquiat left behind, from a legal and financial point of view, but not so much his legacy as an artist. (Apologies to the family if I got that wrong…there was a lot to take in at the exhibit and I should have taken pictures to collect details…maybe I’ll go again.)

Now his younger sisters, Lisane and Jeanine, manage his work.

I have not been through previous exhibits devoted to Basquiat’s work, so I don’t know how they were presented.

But, you can’t walk through this exhibit and not feel this man’s legacy not only as an artist but as an older brother. Well, maybe you can if you haven’t lost a sibling. But if you have, wow. Heidi and Rebecca were right. Sibling loss is all over this show.

It’s the most personal exhibit I’ve ever seen. And by personal I mean framed through the lens of his sisters’ memory of him, their shared childhood, and what influenced him and who he influenced, from their point of view. Part of the exhibit includes a recreation of the Basquiat living room and dining room of the 1960s and 70s.

I’d have to go back and count the plaques on the wall to say this for certain, but I’m probably within the bounds of accuracy to say that A LOT of them were either written by his sisters or quoted them. There are numerous videos, featuring a cousin here and there, a couple people from the art world, but mainly his sisters, telling stories about him. Some are art related, some are not.

It got me to thinking about legacies….

What the people who go before us leave behind. What stands to represent us. And how, often, the personal is left out.

I wonder if Jean-Michel really knew how lasting his work would be. Can any artist really comprehend, even if they see fame in their lifetime, that their names will become recognizable even to those who have never really seen or heard their work? I know the name Bach, but I’m not sure I could name one of his musical works or hum one.

And the personal legacy…just as deep, within those we leave behind. Do any of us really appreciate the imprint we leave on others?

And what about when the public and personal legacy left behind merge, as it does in the Basquiat show? When we see the famous artist as a person…a person who was not only gifted and compulsively creative but encouraged his little sister, then a toddler, to jump off the top of a wardrobe holding an umbrella in effort to emulate Mary Poppins?

Years ago, in college a William & Mary, I looked up some personal info about a writer we were studying in class (I no longer remember who it was). I was fascinated by how it might have influenced the writer’s work. But when I raised my hand in class and mentioned it (I was not a big hand raiser, so this was not a small act) the teacher rolled his eyes and told me that the personal was basically irrelevant and that the work should be interpreted on its own. He made it sound like a disservice to the writer to look at it otherwise.

Similarly, when I was researching The Empty Room, my book about sibling loss, I interviewed a psychologist who had written one of the few scholarly books on sibling loss. She told me she had lost a sibling. But it was never mentioned in her book, not even in the intro or prologue. And she told me she normally kept mum about it and didn’t want it widely known.

Apparently, in that world, having personal experience with something, or rather letting it be known that you do in the context of your work, compromises your perceived ability to be objective. She wasn’t the only researcher I encountered like that. In fact, I now basically assume that any researcher who has done a study on sibling loss, or written a book about it has personal experience with it that they are not publicly claiming.

Anyway…

All of this also got me thinking of how hard it is to share legacies, if someone was famous. My brother was not famous for anything other than his illness and the living circumstances it forced upon him. But the press loved his story, and wanted it. My brother did not want the notoriety. My parents tried to protect him, but stories emerged anyway, and his story was immortalized in pop culture forevermore when it was merged with another boy’s, who had a different illness but also lived in a sterile room for the rest of his life, in the movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. (We did not give anyone permission for that story, fyi. Somebody in the hospital talked.) To me, he was my brother, not a public figure. And I notice when people who were not close to him want to own a part of this story, because it’s holding on to something or someone notorious. And to be honest, I don’t like it. I don’t like sharing him.

I wonder if that is how Basquiat’s sisters feel.

You get that sense in the exhibit. I mean, he’ and his work are so famous they don’t have much choice but to share him. But they make their ownership of him as a human being pretty clear, I think. There’s a video that plays on three screens as you make your way out of the exhibit. It’s the same video playing on all of them. It’s one of his sisters, and among her parting words are something to the effect of….other people see all the art and everything he left behind…but ”I just miss him.”

Maybe we don’t want our legacies framed by our loved ones after we’re gone. Maybe Basquiat would prefer his work be shown without all of this context. I don’t know. My brother might be really pissed about how much I talk about him. I’ve said it before and I will say it again…the refrain “get a life” often rolls through my head when I wonder what my brother would make of much of my writing.

In that case, we all ought to be really careful about the documents we leave behind stating our wishes about how the ones we leave behind are allowed to share our stories, I suppose.

Where am I going with all of this? I don’t know. All I can say is, the exhibit stayed with me, still stays with me, and that’s not typical for me. Walking through it, yesterday, I felt the loss of the artist and the person, and I felt his sisters’ pride and love, and their pain.

It was…fascinating, and more than just a visual experience.

I may go back. And if you’re in NYC, I highly recommend going.