A white Cadillac on the strip, gang members from rival labels, a Glock .40 passing hands. Boom, boom, boom.
Saturday, September 7th, 1996. After attending the Mike Tyson/Bruce Seldon fight, Tupac Shakur was shot four times while sitting in a BMW at the intersection of Flamingo and Koval, just a block off the Vegas Strip. A white Cadillac pulled alongside the BMW and multiple shots were fired, four hitting Tupac. Six days later, on Friday, September 13th, he’s dead.
How does a high-profile murder happen in Vegas? Not broad daylight, but close. In one of the most populated, policed, and surveilled cities in the country, on fight night, with the shooter getting away—not only defies explanation, it suspends disbelief.
Now, 28 years later, this show opens on the same day—a Saturday, September 7th. The 2024 calendar mirrors 1996 exactly, the same day and date. It feels like more than a coincidence—it feels like a provocation. It doesn’t just remind us of the unanswered questions surrounding that night; it provides an answer.
Detective Russell Poole, who spent years working on this case and the murder of Notorious B.I.G. once said, “You got to think to yourself, ‘Who could do this and get away with it? Cops.’” Poole died suddenly of a heart attack in 2015 while discussing the case at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
Clynton Lowry is an artist based in New York and Los Angeles. He is the creator and editor of Art Handler, as well as the founder of Jobs.art, an international listings website for the art community.
Lowry received his MFA in Painting from Yale School of Art and his BA in English from UC Berkeley.