Keith Haring treated empty subway ad panels as his personal laboratory
From December 1980, a young art student began chalking crawling babies and barking dogs onto the black paper covering unused advertising slots in New York's subway. Within a decade Keith Haring had painted more than 50 public murals, opened a shop selling affordable art, and shown at documenta and the Venice Biennale.
Haring was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on May 4, 1958, and grew up in Kutztown with three younger sisters. His father Allen, an engineer who drew cartoons for fun, sat drawing with him, and the boy soaked up Walt Disney, Dr. Seuss and Charles Schulz. As a teenager he drifted into the Jesus movement, then hitchhiked around the country selling homemade T-shirts with Grateful Dead and anti-Nixon designs.
Commercial art school in Pittsburgh bored him. Reading Robert Henri's The Art Spirit pushed him toward his own work, and working as a maintenance man at Pittsburgh's Arts and Crafts Center let him study Dubuffet, Pollock and Mark Tobey. A 1977 Pierre Alechinsky retrospective encouraged big images mixing writing and figures, while a 1978 lecture by Christo showed him how the public could become part of a piece. That same year he relocated to New York's Lower East Side and enrolled in painting at the School of Visual Arts, bussing tables at the Danceteria club and studying semiotics with Bill Beckley.
The subway became his proving ground. The Radiant Baby, an infant giving off rays of light, served as his tag and grew into his best-known symbol, joined by flying saucers and dancing figures in a recurring visual vocabulary. Borrowing the cut-up method of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, he also pasted scrambled fake headlines onto Manhattan lamp-posts in 1980, and organised shows at Club 57 that his friend Tseng Kwong Chi filmed.
Fame never softened his politics. His imagery tackled apartheid, the crack epidemic, safe sex and AIDS, and in 1986 he opened the Pop Shop so ordinary buyers could own his designs. Between 1982 and 1989 he produced over 50 murals, many donated to hospitals and schools. He died of AIDS-related complications on February 16, 1990, and the Whitney Museum mounted a retrospective in 1997. In 2019 the Stonewall Inn placed his name among the first 50 on its National LGBTQ Wall of Honor.
Source: Keith Haring
