Keith Haring

Keith Haring Biography

Keith Haring was born on May 4, 1958 in Reading, Pennsylvania, and was raised in nearby Kutztown, Pennsylvania. He developed a love for drawing at a very early age, learning basic cartooning skills from his father and from the popular culture around him, such as Dr. Seuss and Walt Disney.

Upon graduation from high school in 1976, Haring enrolled in the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh, a commercial arts school. He soon realized that he had little interest in becoming a commercial graphic artist and, after two semesters, dropped out. While in Pittsburgh, Haring continued to study and work on his own and in 1978 had a solo exhibition of his work at the Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center.

Later that same year, Haring moved to New York City and enrolled in the School of Visual Arts (SVA). In New York, Haring found a thriving alternative art community that was developing outside the gallery and museum system, in the downtown streets, the subways and spaces in clubs and former dance halls. Here he became friends with fellow artists Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat, as well as the musicians, performance artists and graffiti writers that comprised the burgeoning art community. Haring was swept up in the energy and spirit of this scene and began to organize and participate in exhibitions and performances at Club 57 and other alternative venues.

In addition to being impressed by the innovation and energy of his contemporaries, Haring was also inspired by the work of Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Alechinsky, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Robert Henri’s manifesto The Art Spirit, which asserted the fundamental independence of the artist. With these influences Haring was able to push his own youthful impulses toward a singular kind of graphic expression based on the primacy of the line. Also drawn to the public and participatory nature of Christo’s work, in particular Running Fence, and by Andy Warhol’s unique fusion of art and life, Haring was determined to devote his career to creating a truly public art.

As a student at SVA, Haring experimented with performance, video, installation and collage, while always maintaining a strong commitment to drawing. In 1980, Haring found a highly effective medium that allowed him to communicate with the wider audience he desired, when he noticed the unused advertising panels covered with matte black paper in a subway station. He began to create drawings in white chalk upon these blank paper panels throughout the subway system. Between 1980 and 1985, Haring produced hundreds of these public drawings in rapid rhythmic lines, sometimes creating as many as forty “subway drawings” in one day. This seamless flow of images became familiar to New York commuters, who often would stop to engage the artist when they encountered him at work. The subway became, as Haring said, a “laboratory” for working out his ideas and experimenting with his simple lines.

Between 1980 and 1989, Haring achieved international recognition and participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions. His first solo exhibition in New York.was held at the Westbeth Painters Space in 1981.  In 1982, he made his Soho gallery debut with an immensely popular and highly acclaimed one-man exhibition at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. During this period, he also participated in renowned international survey exhibitions such as Documenta 7 in Kassel; the São Paulo Biennial; and the Whitney Biennial. Haring completed numerous public projects in the first half of the 80’s as well, ranging from an animation for the Spectacolor billboard in Times Square, designing sets and backdrops for theaters and clubs, developing watch designs for Swatch and an advertising campaign for Absolut vodka; and creating murals worldwide.

In April 1986, Haring opened the Pop Shop, a retail store in Soho selling T-shirts, toys, posters, buttons and magnets bearing his images. Haring considered the shop to be an extension of his work and painted the entire interior of the store in an abstract black on white mural, creating a striking and unique retail environment. The shop was intended to allow people greater access to his work, which was now readily available on products at a low cost. The shop received criticism from many in the art world, however Haring remained committed to his desire to make his artwork available to as wide an audience as possible, and received strong support for his project from friends, fans and mentors including Andy Warhol.

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. The now famous Crack is Wackmural 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. 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.

Haring was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988. In 1989, he established the Keith Haring Foundation, its mandate being to provide funding and imagery to AIDS organizations and children’s programs, and to expand the audience for Haring’s work through exhibitions, publications and the licensing of his images. 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. 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.

Keith Haring Beginnings

This biography uses Keith’s own words to tell his story–words that first appeared in numerous interviews and profiles published during his lifetime, as well as in his personal diaries.

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.

Keith Haring Graduation, June 3, 1976

“…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’…”¹

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.”²

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.

“…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.”³

“…I used the library at Carnegie all the time. I was reading a lot. I was really into Dubuffet at the time… the last works that he did were very similar to the little shaped things I was doing….”

“…And that was the time that I started doing the really big things. I think I was taking the cue from Alechinsky and saying I can do these same things, but I can do them with ink, and I can do them big. I didn’t have to worry about what it was, it was completely spontaneous. But still somehow about the patterns and the shapes…”

“…I saw Christo talk around the same time, and it was right after he had done the Running Fence [1972-1976]. That was another thing that had the most profound effect on me…the event as public art takes it into another arena besides object-making…”⁴

“…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…”⁵

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.

“…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…”⁶

Keith Haring New York

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.

Keith Haring, 1981

photo:Klaus Wittman

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 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.”¹

“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. It was perfect–soft black paper; chalk drew on it really easily.”

“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.”²

“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?”³

“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. 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.”⁴

Keith Haring Transitions

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.”¹

Keith Haring in front of Pisa Mural, 1989

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…”²

“…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…”³

Keith ultimately found acceptance where it counted most for him.

“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.”⁴

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.

“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.”⁵

“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. Which is sort of an interesting idea, that it’s sort of extending your life to some degree.”⁶

Untitled, 1989

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 Haring

Keith Haring

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.”⁷

Keith Haring Art market

Haring created the Pop Shop in 1986 SoHo district of Manhattan, selling T-Shirts, toys, posters and other objects that show his works—allowing his works to be accessible to a larger number of people. Haring was represented until his death by art dealer Tony Shafrazi.  Since his death in 1990, his estate has been administered by the Keith Haring Foundation and the Pop Shop. The foundation has a twofold mission of supporting educational opportunities for underprivileged children and financing AIDS research and patient care. The foundation is represented by Gladstone Gallery.

Keith Haring Authentication issues

There is no catalogue raisonné for Haring; however, there is copious information about him available on the estate's website and elsewhere, enabling prospective buyers or sellers to research exhibition history.^[54] In 2012, the Keith Haring Foundation disbanded its authentication board; that same year, it donated $1 million to support exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art  and $1 million to Planned Parenthood of New York City's Project Street Beat. A 2014 lawsuit, filed by a group of nine art collectors at the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, argued that the foundation's actions have "limited the number of Haring works in the public domain, thereby increasing the value of the Haring works that the foundation and its members own or sell."