Keith Haring

Keith was born to Joan and Allen Haring on May 4, 1958. He grew up in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, the oldest of four siblings. His artistic leanings were evident from a very early age.

“…My father made cartoons. Since I was little, I had been doing cartoons, creating characters and stories. In my mind, though, there was a separation between cartooning and being an ‘artist’…”

Art continued to be a central interest throughout Keith’s experimental and rather rebellious adolescence. Through books and museum visits (Keith saw his first Warhols on a church visit to the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C.) he began to develop an awareness of modern art. After high school, Keith enrolled in the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh.

“I’d been convinced to go [to art school] by my parents and guidance counselor. They said that if I was going to seriously pursue being an artist, I should have some commercial-art background. I went to a commercial-art school, where I quickly realized that I didn’t want to be an illustrator or a graphic designer. The people I met who were doing it seemed really unhappy; they said that they were only doing it for a job while they did their own art on the side, but in reality that was never the case–their own art was lost. I quit the school.”

In 1976, Keith hitchhiked cross-country, stopping along the way to look at other art programs. When he returned to Pittsburgh later that year, he sat in on classes at the University of Pittsburgh, and eventually became involved with the Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center, where he had his first important show.

Elements that would become central to Keith’s style were beginning to emerge; he began working with a vocabulary of small, interconnected abstract shapes. At the same time, he began to discover some of his most important influences among modern artists.

Keith was excited enough about finding his artistic role models and about showing his work in Pittsburgh to start to consider his next steps as an artist.

Keith arrived in New York in 1978 as a scholarship student at the School of Visual Arts. All at once, he began to experience a multicultural urban community with its own expressive vocabulary; a lively environment in which to explore his gay identity; and a peer group, at the School of Visual Arts and in the vibrantly experimental East Village, as energetic and uninhibited as Keith himself.

He was particularly inspired by the beauty and spontaneity of the graffiti he saw in the subways. Graffiti spoke of a world that was hip and streetwise, creative and spontaneous and underground–all that he admired and wanted to be. At the same time, he admired the technical mastery and calligraphic quality of the graffiti artists’ ‘tags.’

His classes at SVA (with teachers such as Keith Sonnier, Joseph Kosuth, Barbara Buchner, and others) provided Keith with an important critical framework for his emerging style. He began to work obsessively, hanging his drawings in the hallways of the school for everyone to see. He created videotapes and performance pieces, and he also began doing a lot of writing. These experiments were part of his search for a unique style of visual communication.

“I was learning, watching people’s reactions and interactions with the drawings and with me and looking at it as a phenomenon. Having this incredible feedback from people, which is one of the main things that kept me going so long, was the participation of the people that were watching me and the kinds of comments and questions and observations that were coming from every range of person you could imagine, from little kids to old ladies to art historians.”

Shows at P.S. 122 and Club 57 added to the visibility Keith had gained through his subway drawings and street graffiti. Growing recognition of his work brought Keith more money and new opportunities, but it brought new pressures into his life as well.

Keith decided to be represented by Tony Shafrazi,which freed him from the pressures of dealing his own work. But more importantly, representation allowed Keith to situate his artwork in the midst of large-scale cultural events.

His first one-man show at Shafrazi in 1982 included drawings, painted tarpaulins, sculptures, and on-site work; Keith also transformed part of Shafrazi’s space into a club-like environment.

The opening was attended by hundreds, and received a great deal of media attention. Keith continued to be energized by his love of, and increasing participation in, popular culture.

Radiant BabyThe next several years brought Keith world-wide recognition. He worked with amazing energy, and had shows in Rotterdam, Tokyo, Naples, Antwerp, London, Cologne, Milan, Basel, Munich, Bordeaux, Amsterdam, Paris and other cities, as well as numerous shows in New York and across the United States. This level of recognition brought Keith terrific opportunities for travel, collaboration and personal and artistic growth. But sometimes his phenomenal success got in the way of his work.

“…[It surprised me] that the work, as early as 1982, which was before I had any exhibitions…had already spread throughout the world. People saw it as something that wasn’t really by one artist but was a vocabulary open to anyone. T-shirts appeared in Japan and sneakers in Brazil and dresses in Australia , way before I ever made any commercial object like that…”

He was friends with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf (English), Andy Warhol and Madonna, collaborated with William S. Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Yoko Ono and Grace Jones.

In April 1986, Keith opened the Pop Shop, a retail store in New York. He explains his philosophy in selling his art through a commercial venue:

“My work was starting to become more expensive and more popular within the art market. Those prices meant that only people who could afford big art prices could have access to the work. The Pop Shop makes it accessible.”

Before, during and after the opening of the Pop Shop, Keith was dogged by a critical ambivalence towards his work, stemming from its broad popularity.

In 1988, Keith was diagnosed with AIDS. By that time, AIDS had already deprived New York City, the art world, the world at large and Keith himself of many friends and luminaries. The diagnosis did not come as a surprise to Keith. He publicly acknowledged his illness in a remarkably candid interview in Rolling Stone magazine. Keith’s response to his illness was characteristically philosophical.

Of course, Keith’s reputation has continued to grow, and his work is more widely admired now than ever before. Keith had broader concerns, however, than extending his reputation as an artist. Before his death, he established the Keith Haring Foundation to continue his charitable support of children’s and AIDS-related organizations.

Keith’s contribution to the art of the 20th century is difficult to fully appreciate, because ultimately he transformed our idea of what art is. When once asked to state the values he was trying to impart in his work, Keith replied,

“A more holistic and basic idea of wanting to incorporate [art] into every part of life, less as an egotistical exercise and more natural somehow. I don’t know how to exactly explain it. Taking it off the pedestal. I’m giving it back to the people, I guess.”

haring.com