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PrideFest America Archives
Artistic Alternatives:
The Works of Keith Haring, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschendberg, and Andy Warhol
March 20 to May 13, 2001
Keith Haring
by Dr. Amy Ingrid Schlegel, Curator, Philadelphia Art Alliance
Keith Haring was born in 1958 in Kutztown, PA. He attended art school in
Pittsburgh, PA and exhibited several abstract drawings at his first solo
exhibition in 1978. In 1979, he moved to New York City and enrolled in the
School of Visual Arts. In 1980, he created his first drawings of flying
saucers, animals, and other human imagery and by 1981 he was drawing with
chalk on black paper in the subway. Haring's signature vocabulary of the
child, barking dog, flying saucer, halo, cross, pyramid, and heart
eventually commingled with sexually explicit imagery in the 1980s.
By 1984 Haring had taken his Pop and Graffiti Art-inspired work from its
origins in the New York subway to the upper echelons of the art world. He
was invited to exhibit at: Documenta 7, Kassel (1982), The Whitney Biennial
(1983), Bienal de Sao Paulo (1983), The Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux
(1985), the Paris Biennale (1985), and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
(1986), to name just a few prestigious institutions that embraced his work
with both solo and group exhibitions.
Throughout his career, Haring was dedicated to public art. He created his
first mural on the Lower East Side of Manhattan as well as others in
Chicago, Sydney, Melbourne, Rio de Janeiro, Dobbs Ferry, Minneapolis,
Amsterdam, Paris, Pisa, and the Berlin Wall. In the late 1980s Haring led
art workshops for children and collaborated with them on the creation of
several murals worldwide. In 1985, Haring began to paint monstrous and
apocalyptic imagery as well as sexually explicit, sometimes homoerotic,
subjects and exhibited them at both the Tony Schafrazi and Leo Castelli
Galleries in New York. In 1986, he opened the first "Pop Shop," which
featured multiples of his paintings and other merchandise in New York. After
he was diagnosed with AIDS, Haring joined the campaign for AIDS awareness in
1989 and established the Keith Haring Foundation, a charitable organization
devoted to various social causes. He continued to devote his time and energy
to social causes, ranging from AIDS awareness to drug abuse in the inner
cities. When Haring died of AIDS-related causes in 1990 he was
internationally renowned for his use of schematic images of babies, dogs,
and human figures, the staples of his visually complex and powerfully direct
murals, paintings, sculptures, and digital works. A video of Keith Haring
drawing from 1982 at the New Arts Program in Kutztown, PA has been produced
especially for this exhibition.
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