“Art is for everybody.”
~ Keith Haring
(text-colour:#feffd6)[[Start the game]]//Keith Haring// was one of the most widely-celebrated New York artists of the 1980s, and his work is still hugely popular today.
Haring moved to New York City in 1978 and began using the city as his canvas, making chalk drawings in subway stations. His art was eventually seen everywhere from public murals and nightclubs to galleries and museums around the world. He was also known for his activism in promoting AIDS awareness. He died of AIDS-related complications on February 16, 1990, at age 31.
Learn more about Keith (text-colour:#feffd6)[[in his own words.]]Though Keith Haring's life was tragically short, he found great success and has left a legacy of ''public artworks'' he created around the world, memorable collaborations with everyone from ''Vivienne Westwood'' to ''David Bowie'', and the work of ''the Keith Haring Foundation'', which funds non-profit organisations to educate disadvantaged youth about HIV and AIDS.
This interactive world will bring you through the life of Keith Haring and is based on the autobiographical collection of quotes from Keith's journals on the major periods of his life found in the The [[Keith Haring Foundation]].
What do you want to learn about first?
[[Beginnings.]]
[[To New York.]]
[[Success.]]
[[Transitions.]]Haring was born in ''Reading, Pennsylvania'' on May 4, 1958. He was raised by his mother, Joan Haring, and father, Allen Haring, an engineer and amateur cartoonist. Keith 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.
(text-colour:#ff7a7a)[[“…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’…”]]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.
In 1978, Haring wrote in his journal: (text-colour:#93ff85)[["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."]]“As an art student and being sort of in the underground and having very precise and cynical ideas about the art world, the traditional art-dealer gallery represented a lot that I hated about the art world. But people started to see an opportunity to make a lot of money buying my work. I got disillusioned with letting dealers and collectors come to my studio. They would come in and, for prices that were nothing, a couple hundred dollars, go through all the paintings and then not get anything or try to bargain...
I wanted to sell my paintings because it would enable me to quit my job, whether as a cook or delivering house plants or whatever else I was doing–and paint full time. (text-colour:#a3e3ff)[[But I had to have a gallery just to give me distance.]]”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.
“It’s frightening how much power critics and curators have. People like that have enough power to write you out of history...
I think that in a way some critics are insulted because I didn’t need them. Even with the subway drawings I didn’t go through any of the ‘proper channels’ and succeeded in going directly to the public and finding my own audience, I bypassed them and found my public without them. They didn’t have the chance to take credit for what I did. They think that they have the role of finding the artist and then teaching the public.I sort of stepped on some toes..."
(text-colour:#ffd6f8)[[Keith ultimately found acceptance where it counted most for him.]]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.
(text-colour:#ff9f80)[[“…I went to a huge retrospective by Pierre Alechinsky at the Carnegie Museum of Art. It was the first time that I had seen someone who was older and established doing something that was vaguely similar to my little abstract drawings. It gave me this whole new boost of confidence.”]]His classes at SVA 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.
(text-colour:#8fffb6)[[“I bought a roll of oak-tag paper and cut it up and put it all over the floor and worked on this whole group of drawings. The first few were abstracts, but then these images started coming. They were humans and animals in different combinations. Then flying saucers were zapping the humans. I remember trying to figure out where this stuff came from, but I have no idea. It just grew into this group of drawings. I was thinking about these images as symbols, as a vocabulary of things. In one a dog’s being worshipped by these people. In another one the dog is being zapped by a flying saucer. Suddenly it made sense to draw on the street, because I had something to say.”]]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.
(text-colour:#ffbf80)[[“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.”]]From Alechinsky 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.
(text-colour:#ffea80)[[“…The thing I responded to most was Christo’s belief that art could reach all kinds of people, as opposed to the traditional view, which has art as this elitist thing…”]]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. His first significant one-man exhibition was in Pittsburgh at the Center for the Arts in 1978.
(text-colour:#dbff8f)[“…When someone canceled an exhibition at the Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center and they had an empty space, the director offered me an exhibit in one of the galleries. For Pittsburgh, this was a big thing, especially for me, being nineteen and showing in the best place I could show in Pittsburgh besides the museum. From that time, I knew I wasn’t going to be satisfied with Pittsburgh anymore or the life I was living there. I had started sleeping with men…I decided to make a major break. New York was the only place to go…”]
[[To New York.]]
Go back to hear Keith, [[in his own words.]] “One day, riding the subway, I saw this ''empty black panel'' where an advertisement was supposed to go. I immediately realized that this was the perfect place to draw. I went back above ground to a card shop and bought a box of white chalk, went back down and did a drawing on it...
I kept seeing more and more of these black spaces, and I drew on them whenever I saw one. Because they were so fragile, ''people left them alone and respected them''; they didn’t rub them out or try to mess them up. It gave them this other power. It was this chalk-white fragile thing in the middle of all this power and tension and violence that the subway was. People were completely enthralled...
(text-colour:#8affc8)[[I was always totally amazed that the people I would meet while I was doing them were really, really concerned with what they meant. The first thing anyone asked me, no matter how old, no matter who they were, was what does it mean?]]”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''.
(text-colour:#a5a3ff)[[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.]]“The ''context of where you do something'' is going to have an effect. The subway drawings were, as much as they were drawings, ''performances''. It was where I learned how to draw in public. You draw in front of people. For me ''it was a whole sort of philosophical and sociological experiment''. (text-colour:#a3ffe8)[[When I drew, I drew in the daytime which meant there were always people watching. There were always confrontations, whether it was with people that were interested in looking at it, or people that wanted to tell you you shouldn’t be drawing there...]]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.”
(text-colour:#a3baff)[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.]
[[Success.]]
Go back to hear Keith, [[in his own words.]] “...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...”
The 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. (text-colour:#c8a3ff)[[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.]]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:
(text-colour:#eba3ff)[“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.”]
[[Transitions.]]
Go back to hear Keith, [[in his own words.]] “The things that have always given me the strength and confidence not to worry about negative criticism are, first of all, ''support from other artists, artists whom I look up to and respect'' much more than I respect these critics or curators, and second, ''things that come from real people, people who don’t have any art background, who aren’t part of the elitist establishment or of the intellectual community but who respond with complete honesty from deep down inside their hearts or their souls.''”

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. (text-colour:#ffadf8)[[He publicly acknowledged his illness in a remarkably candid interview in Rolling Stone magazine. Keith’s response to his illness was characteristically philosophical.]]“No matter how long you work, it’s always going to end sometime. And there’s always going to be things left undone. And it wouldn’t matter if you lived until you were seventy-five. There would still be new ideas. There would still be things that you wished you would have accomplished. You could work for several lifetimes.Part of the reason that I’m not having trouble facing the reality of death is that it’s not a limitation, in a way. It could have happened any time, and it is going to happen sometime. If you live your life according to that, death is irrelevant. Everything I’m doing right now is exactly what I want to do...
All of the things that you make are a ''kind of quest for immortality''. Because you’re making these things that you know have a different kind of life. They don’t depend on breathing, so they’ll last longer than any of us will. (text-colour:#ffadd9)[[Which is sort of an interesting idea, that it’s sort of extending your life to some degree.”]]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.”
Before his death, keith was involved in multiple [[social movements]].
Go back to hear Keith, [[in his own words.]] Throughout his career, Haring devoted much of his time to public works, which often carried social messages. He produced more than 50 public artworks between 1982 and 1989, in dozens of cities around the world, many of which were created for charities, hospitals, children’s day care centers and orphanages.
Haring also held drawing workshops for children in schools and museums in New York, Amsterdam, London, Tokyo and Bordeaux, and produced imagery for many literacy programs and other public service campaigns.
The now famous //Crack is Wack// mural of 1986 has become a landmark along New York’s FDR Drive. Other projects include; a mural created for the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty in 1986, on which Haring worked with 900 children; a mural on the exterior of Necker Children’s Hospital in Paris, France in 1987; and a mural painted on the western side of the Berlin Wall three years before its fall.
(text-colour:#ffadc2)[[Haring enlisted his imagery during the last years of his life to speak about his own illness and generate activism and awareness about AIDS.]] During a brief but intense career that spanned the 1980s, Haring’s work was featured in over 100 solo and group exhibitions. In 1986 alone, he was the subject of more than 40 newspaper and magazine articles. He was highly sought after to participate in collaborative projects ,and worked with artists and performers as diverse as Madonna, Grace Jones, Bill T. Jones, William Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Jenny Holzer, Yoko Ono and Andy Warhol. (text-colour:#ffadad)[[By expressing universal concepts of birth, death, love, sex and war, using a primacy of line and directness of message, Haring was able to attract a wide audience and assure the accessibility and staying power of his imagery, which has become a universally recognized visual language of the 20th century.]]Keith Haring died of AIDS related complications at the age of 31 on February 16, 1990. A memorial service was held on May 4, 1990 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, with over 1,000 people in attendance.
Since his death, Haring has been the subject of several international retrospectives. The work of Keith Haring can be seen today in the exhibitions and collections of major museums around the world.
You've reached the end of this interactive experience, but feel free go back to hear more from Keith, [[in his own words.]]Keith established the Foundation shortly before he died to do three things:
1. To ''preserve'' and ''exhibit his artwork''.
2. To ''provide support to not-for-profit organizations'' that assist children, as well as organizations ''involved in education, research and care related to HIV and AIDS''.
3. To be ''a source of accurate information'' about his life and work.