Keith Haring
Keith Allen Haring was an American artist whose pop art emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture of the 1980s. His animated imagery has "become a widely recognized visual language". Much of his work includes sexual allusions that turned into social activism by using the images to advocate for safe sex and AIDS awareness. 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.
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. After gaining public recognition, he created colorful larger scale murals, many commissioned. 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.
Haring died of AIDS-related complications on February 16, 1990. 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
Early life and education: 1958–1979
Haring was born at Community General Hospital in Reading, Pennsylvania, on May 4, 1958. 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. He became interested in art at a very young age, spending time with his father producing creative drawings. His early influences included Walt Disney cartoons, Dr. Seuss, Charles Schulz, and the Looney Tunes characters in The Bugs Bunny Show.Haring's family attended the United Church of Christ. In his early teenage years, he was involved with the Jesus movement. He later hitchhiked across the country, selling T-shirts he made featuring the Grateful Dead and anti-Nixon designs. He graduated from Kutztown Area High School in 1976. He studied commercial art from 1976 to 1978 at Pittsburgh's Ivy School of Professional Art, but eventually lost interest, inspired to focus on his own art after reading The Art Spirit by Robert Henri.
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.
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. 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.
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 becomes as important as the resulting painting."
Early work: 1980–1981
Haring first received public attention with his graffiti art in subways, where he created white chalk drawings on black, unused advertisement boards in the stations. 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". 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. Symbols and images 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. 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". 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. 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, photographer Tseng Kwong Chi. In February 1981, Haring had his first solo exhibition at Westbeth Painters Space in the West Village. In November 1981, Hal Bromm Gallery in Tribeca presented the artist's first solo exhibition at a commercial gallery.
Breakthrough and rise to fame: 1982–1986
In January 1982, Haring was the first of twelve artists organized by Public Art Fund to display work on the computer-animated Spectacolor billboard in Times Square. That summer, Haring created his first major outdoor mural on the Houston Bowery Wall on the Lower East Side. In his paintings, he often used lines to show energy and movement. Haring would often work quickly, trying to create as much work as possible—sometimes completing as many as 40 paintings in a day. One of his works, Untitled, depicts two figures with a radiant heart-love motif, which critics have interpreted as a bold nod to homosexual love and a significant cultural statement.In 1982, Haring participated in documenta 7 in Kassel, where his works were exhibited alongside Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. In October 1982, he had an exhibition at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery with his collaborator graffiti artist Angel "LA II" Ortiz. That year, he was in several group exhibitions including Fast at the Alexander Milliken Gallery in New York. Haring designed the poster for the 1983 Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.
In February 1983, Haring had a solo exhibition at the Fun Gallery in the East Village, Manhattan. That year, Haring participated in the São Paulo Biennale in Brazil and the Whitney Biennial in New York. In April 1983, Haring was commissioned to paint a mural, Construction Fence, at the construction site of the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee. Later that year, Haring took part in the exhibition Urban Pulses: the Artist and the City in Pittsburgh by spray painting a room at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and creating an outdoor mural at PPG Place. In October 1983, Elio Fiorucci invited Haring to Milan to paint the walls of his Fiorucci store. While Haring was in London for the opening of his exhibition at the Robert Fraser Gallery in October 1983, he met and began collaborating with choreographer Bill T. Jones. Haring used Jones' body as the canvas to paint from head to toe.
Haring and Angel "LA II" Ortiz produced a T-shirt design for friends Willi Smith and Laurie Mallet's clothing label WilliWear Productions in 1984. After Haring was profiled in Paper magazine, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood reached out to editor-in-chief Kim Hastreiter to facilitate a meeting with Haring. Haring presented Westwood with two large sheets of drawings and she turned them into textiles for her Autumn/Winter 1983–84 Witches collection. Haring's friend Madonna wore a skirt from the collection, most notably in the music video her 1984 single "Borderline."
As Haring rose to stardom he continued to draw in the subways, contrasting the rocketing prices for his work. Haring enjoyed giving his work away for free, often handing out free buttons and posters of his work. In 1984, he released a book titled Art in Transit, which featured photography by Tseng Kwong Chi and an introduction by Henry Geldzahler. Haring's swift rise to international celebrity status was covered by the media. His art covered the February 1984 issue of Vanity Fair, and he was featured in the October 1984 issue of Newsweek. In July 1984, he painted singer Grace Jones for the first time for Interview magazine.In 1984, the New York City Department of Sanitation asked Haring to design a logo for their anti-litter campaign. Haring participated in the Venice Biennale. He was invited to create temporary murals at the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. During his visit to Australia, he painted the permanent Keith Haring Mural at Collingwood Technical College in Melbourne. That year, Haring also painted murals at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and in Serra Grande, located in Bahia, Brazil. Later that year, he designed the stage set for the production of Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane's Secret Pastures at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
In 1985, Swatch introduced a line of watches designed by Haring. Haring was commissioned by the United Nations to create a first day cover of the United Nations stamp and an accompanying limited edition lithograph to commemorate 1985 as International Youth Year. He designed MTV set decorations and painted murals for various art institutions and nightclubs, such as the Palladium in Manhattan. In March 1985, Haring painted the walls of the Grande Halle de la Villette for the Biennale de Paris.
In July 1985, Haring made a painting for the Live Aid concert at J.F.K. Stadium in Philadelphia. Additionally, he painted a car owned by art dealer Max Protetch to be auctioned, with proceeds donated to African famine relief. Haring continued to be politically active as well by designing Free South Africa posters in 1985, and creating a poster for the 1986 Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament.
In December 1985, Haring painted The Ten Commandments to commemorate his first solo museum show at the CAPC musée d'art contemporain in Bordeaux. Haring had a solo museum exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and he painted a mural on the façade of the museum's storage building in March 1986.
In June 1986, Haring created a banner, CityKids Speak on Liberty, in conjunction with The CityKids Foundation to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the Statue of Liberty's arrival in the United States. Later that month, he created his Crack Is Wack mural in East Harlem, visible from New York's FDR Drive. It was originally considered as vandalism by the New York Police Department and Haring was arrested. But after local media outlets picked up the story, Haring was released on a lesser charge. While he was in jail, Haring's original work was vandalized to read "Crack Is It", then was overpainted by the Parks Department. This mural is an example of Haring's use of consciousness raising rather than consumerism, "Crack is Wack" rather than "Coke is it." He painted an updated version of the mural on the same wall in October 1986.
In September 1986, Haring's permanent murals were unveiled at Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn.
He created a mural on the Berlin Wall for the Checkpoint Charlie Museum on October 23, 1986. The mural was long and depicted red and black interlocking human figures against a yellow background. The colors were a representation of the German flag and symbolized the hope of unity between East and West Germany.
Haring painted a skirt for Grace Jones to wear in her music video "I'm Not Perfect " and he was the assistant director for the video. He also body painted Jones for live performances at the Paradise Garage, and for her role of Katrina the Queen of The Vampires in the 1986 film Vamp. Haring collaborated with David Spada, a jewelry designer, to design the sculptural adornments for Jones.
Haring collaborated with Warhol to design the poster for the 1986 Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. The poster was also used for the 1986 Montreux-Detroit Jazz Festival in Detroit. He also designed a poster for Absolut Vodka, which was unveiled at the Whitney Museum in New York in October 1986. In December 1986, while in Phoenix to meet with potential backers for a Haring-designed public playground, he led a drawing workshop at the Phoenix Art Museum, gave a lecture, and painted a mural with students downtown.
Haring illustrated vinyl covers for various artists such as David Bowie's "Without You", N.Y.C. Peech Boys' Life Is Something Special, Malcolm McLaren's "Duck For The Oyster", and Sylvester's "Someone Like You".