Keith Haring
Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) was an American artist whose pop art emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture of the 1980s.[1] His animated imagery has "become a widely recognized visual language".[2] Much of his work includes sexual allusions that turned into social activism by using the images to advocate for safe sex and AIDS awareness.[3] In addition to solo gallery exhibitions, he participated in renowned national and international group shows such as documenta in Kassel, the Whitney Biennial in New York, the São Paulo Biennial, and the Venice Biennale. The Whitney Museum held a retrospective of his art in 1997.
Keith Haring
February 16, 1990 (aged 31)
Complications from AIDS
- Keith Haring Mural (1984)
- Crack Is Wack (1986)
- Tower (1987)
- Todos Juntos Podemos Parar el SIDA (1989)
- Tuttomondo (1989)
- Untitled Series (with Sean Kalish) (1989–90)
Haring's popularity grew from his spontaneous drawings in New York City subways—chalk outlines of figures, dogs, and other stylized images on blank black advertising spaces.[4] After gaining public recognition, he created colorful larger scale murals, many commissioned.[4] He produced more than 50 public artworks between 1982 and 1989, many of them created voluntarily for hospitals, day care centers and schools. In 1986, he opened the Pop Shop as an extension of his work. His later work often conveyed political and societal themes—anti-crack, anti-apartheid, safe sex, homosexuality and AIDS—through his own iconography.[5]
Haring died of AIDS-related complications on February 16, 1990.[6] In 2014, he was one of the inaugural honorees in the Rainbow Honor Walk in San Francisco, a walk of fame noting LGBTQ people who have "made significant contributions in their fields". In 2019, he was one of the inaugural 50 American "pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes" inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument in New York City's Stonewall Inn.
Biography[edit]
Early life and education: 1958–1979[edit]
Haring was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on May 4, 1958.[7] He was raised in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, by his mother, Joan Haring, and father, Allen Haring, an engineer and amateur cartoonist. He had three younger sisters, Kay, Karen and Kristen.[8] He became interested in art at a very young age, spending time with his father producing creative drawings.[9] His early influences included Walt Disney cartoons, Dr. Seuss, Charles Schulz, and the Looney Tunes characters in The Bugs Bunny Show.[9]
Haring's family attended the United Church of Christ.[10] In his early teenage years, he was involved with the Jesus movement.[11] He later hitchhiked across the country, selling T-shirts he made featuring the Grateful Dead and anti-Nixon designs.[12] He graduated from Kutztown Area High School in 1976.[13] He studied commercial art from 1976 to 1978 at Pittsburgh's Ivy School of Professional Art, but eventually lost interest,[14] inspired to focus on his own art after reading The Art Spirit (1923) by Robert Henri.[9]
Haring had a maintenance job at the Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center and was able to explore the art of Jean Dubuffet, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Tobey. He was highly influenced around this time by a 1977 retrospective of Pierre Alechinsky's work and by a lecture that the sculptor Christo gave in 1978. From Alechinsky's work, he felt encouraged to create large images that featured writing and characters. From Christo, Haring was introduced to ways of incorporating the public into his art. His first significant exhibition was in Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center in 1978.[15][16]
Haring moved to the Lower East Side of New York in 1978 to study painting at the School of Visual Arts. He also worked as a busboy during this time at the nightclub Danceteria.[17] While attending school he studied semiotics with Bill Beckley and experimented with video and performance art. Haring was also highly influenced in his art by author William Burroughs.[9]
In 1978, Haring wrote in his journal: "I am becoming much more aware of movement. The importance of movement is intensified when a painting becomes a performance. The performance (the act of painting) becomes as important as the resulting painting."[18]
In December 2007, an area of the American Textile Building in the TriBeCa neighborhood of New York City was discovered to have a Haring painting from 1979.[19]
Early work: 1980–1981[edit]
Haring first received public attention with his graffiti art in subways, where he created white chalk drawings on black, unused advertisement backboards in the stations.[20] He considered the subways to be his "laboratory," a place where he could experiment and create his artwork and saw the black advertisement paper as a free space and "the perfect place to draw".[21] The Radiant Baby, a crawling infant with emitting rays of light, became his most recognized symbol. He used it as his tag to sign his work while a subway artist.[11] Symbols and images (such as barking dogs, flying saucers, and large hearts) became common in his work and iconography. As a result, Haring's works spread quickly and he became increasingly more recognizable.
The cut-up technique in the writings of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin inspired Haring's work with lettering and words.[12] In 1980, he created headlines from word juxtaposition and attached hundreds to lamp-posts around Manhattan. These included phrases like "Reagan Slain by Hero Cop" and "Pope Killed for Freed Hostage".[22] That same year, as part of his participating in The Times Square Show with one of his earliest public projects, Haring altered a banner advertisement above a subway entrance in Times Square that showed a female embracing a male's legs, blacking-out the first letter so that it essentially read "hardón" instead of "Chardón," a French clothing brand.[23] He later used other forms of commercial material to spread his work and messages. This included mass-producing buttons and magnets to hand out and working on top of subway ads.
In 1980, Haring began organizing exhibitions at Club 57, which were filmed by his close friend and photographer Tseng Kwong Chi.[24] In February 1981, Haring had his first solo exhibition at Westbeth Painters Space in the West Village.[25][26] In November 1981, he had a solo show at Hal Bromm Gallery in Tribeca.[27]
Friendships[edit]
Soon after moving to New York to study at the School of Visual Arts, he became friends with classmates Kenny Scharf (his one time roommate),[116] Samantha McEwen, and John Sex.[117] Eventually, he befriended Jean-Michel Basquiat, who would write his SAMO graffiti around the campus.[118] When Basquiat died in 1988, Haring wrote his obituary for Vogue magazine, and he paid homage to him with the painting A Pile of Crowns for Jean-Michel Basquiat (1988).[119][120]
In 1979, Haring met photographer Tseng Kwong Chi in the East Village. They became friends and he documented much of Haring's career.[121] In 1980, Haring met and began collaborating with graffiti artist Angel "LA II" Ortiz.[29] Haring recounted: "We just immediately hit it off. It's as if we'd known each other all our lives. He's like my little brother."[29] Ortiz's artistry formed an important part of Haring's work that had gone unacknowledged by the art establishment.[122][123] Following Haring's death, Ortiz stopped receiving credit and payment for his part in Haring's work. According to Montez, author of the book Keith Haring's Line: Race and the Performance of Desire, the Keith Haring Foundation and the art world have since made strides to rectify Ortiz's erasure.[124]
By the early 1980s, Haring had established friendships with fellow emerging artists Fab 5 Freddy and Futura 2000, and singer Madonna.[12][125] In 1982, Haring befriended Andy Warhol, who became his mentor and later the theme of his 1986 Andy Mouse series.[126] Warhol also created a portrait of Haring and his partner Juan Dubose in 1983.[127] Through Warhol, Haring became friends with Grace Jones, Francesco Clemente, and Yoko Ono.[12] He also formed friendships with George Condo, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, and Claude Picasso.[128]
Haring met accessories designer Bobby Breslau in the early 1980s. Haring looked to Breslau for guidance and called him his "Jewish mother."[129] Breslau introduced Haring to his friend Larry Levan, resident DJ at the Paradise Garage.[129] Breslau inspired Haring to work with leather hides and he was the manager of the Pop Shop until his death in 1987.[130]
Art dealer Yves Arman was Haring's close friend, and Haring was the godfather of his daughter. Haring said Arman was "probably the best supporter I had in the art world."[12] In 1989, Arman was killed in a car accident on his way to see Haring in Spain.[12]
In 1988, Gil Vazquez was invited by a friend to visit Haring's Broadway studio.[131] Haring and Vazquez became close friends and spent a great deal of time together. Before his death, Haring set up a foundation bearing his name. He appointed his assistant and studio manager Julia Gruen to be the executive director; she began working for him in 1984.[132] Vazquez is the board president of the foundation, which is based at Haring's Broadway studio.[133]
Exhibitions[edit]
During his lifetime, Haring had over 50 solo exhibitions, and was represented by well-known galleries such as the Tony Shafrazi Gallery and the Leo Castelli Gallery.[165] Since his death, has been featured in over 150 exhibitions around the world.[166] He has also been the subject of several international retrospectives.
Haring had his first solo exhibition at Westbeth Painters Space in February 1981.[25][26] That month he also participated in New York/New Wave exhibit at MoMA PS1.[167] Later that year he had a solo exhibition in the Hal Bromm Gallery,[168] followed by his breakthrough exhibition at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 1982.[117] That same year, he took part in documenta 7 in Kassel as well as Public Art Fund's Messages to the Public series in which he created work for a Spectacolor billboard in Times Square.[11] In 1983, Haring contributed work to the Whitney Biennial and the São Paulo Biennial. He also had solo exhibitions at the Fun Gallery, Galerie Watari in Tokyo, and his second show the Tony Shafarzi Gallery.[169][170][35]
In 1984, Haring participated in the group show Arte di Frontiera: New York Graffiti in Italy.[171] He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1984 and 1986.[172][36] In 1985, Haring took part in the Paris Biennial and he had his first solo museum exhibition at the CAPC in Bordeaux.[173][3] In 1986, three of Haring's sculptures were placed at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza outside the United Nations headquarters.[174][90] Two of the works were displayed at Riverside Park from May 1988 to May 1989.[90] In 1991–92, Haring's Figure Balancing on Dog was displayed in Dante Park in Manhattan.[90]
In 1996, a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia was the first major exhibition of his work in Australia. His art was the subject of a 1997 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, curated by Elisabeth Sussman.[175] The Public Art Fund, in collaboration with the Estate of Keith Haring, organized a multi-site installation of his outdoor sculptures at Central Park's Doris C. Freedman Plaza and along the Park Avenue Malls.[176] This public exhibition occurred simultaneously with the retrospective at the Whitney.[177] The sculptures later traveled to the West Coast in 1998. The San Francisco Arts Commission displayed 10 sculptures around San Francisco to coincide with Haring's retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.[178] The city of West Hollywood and Haring's estate also presented his sculptures on Santa Monica Boulevard.[179]
In 2007, Haring's painted aluminum sculpture Self-Portrait (1989) was displayed in the lobby of the Arsenal in Central Park, as part of the retrospective exhibition The Outdoor Gallery: 40 Years of Public Art in New York City Parks.[90]
In 2008, there was a retrospective exhibition at the MAC in Lyon, France. In February 2010, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Haring's death, the Tony Shafrazi Gallery showed an exhibition containing dozens of works from every stage of Haring's career.[180] In March 2012, a retrospective exhibit of his work, Keith Haring: 1978–1982, opened at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.[181] In April 2013, Keith Haring: The Political Line opened at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Le Cent Quatre. In November 2014, then at the De Young Museum in San Francisco.[182]
From December 2016 to June 2017, the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles exhibited The Unconventional Canvases of Keith Haring, which featured five vehicles that Haring painted.[183] In 2019, Haring's work was exhibited at Gladstone Gallery in Belgium.[184] The first major UK exhibition of Haring's work, featuring more than 85 artworks, was at Tate Liverpool from June to November 2019.[185] From December 2019 to March 2020, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne exhibited Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines.[186]
In February 2021, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver opened the exhibition Keith Haring: Grace House Mural, which displays 13 panels from a mural Haring painted at a Catholic youth center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in either March 1983 or 1984.[187] The mural—which featured Haring's radiant baby, barking dog, and dancing man figures—spanned three floors and 85 feet. When Grace House was sold, its operator, the Church of the Ascension, went against the Keith Haring Foundation's wishes of securing a buyer who would maintain the work. Instead, the church had sections of the mural cut out and sold at auction in 2019 to an anonymous private collector for $3.86 million. The panels are on loan to the museum and will appear on exhibit until August 22, 2021.
In 2022, the exhibition Keith Haring: Grace House Mural was displayed at the Schunck Museum in Heerlen.[188] In 2023, The Broad presented Haring's first museum exhibition in Los Angeles, Keith Haring: Art is for Everyone.[189]