Keith Haring

Early life and education: 1958–1979

Haring was born at Community General Hospital in Reading, Pennsylvania, on May 4, 1958. He was raised in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, by his mother, Joan Haring, and father, Allen Haring, an engineer and amateur cartoonist. He had three younger sisters, Kay, Karen and Kristen. He 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.

Haring's family attended the United Church of Christ. In his early teenage years, he was involved with the Jesus movement. He later hitchhiked across the country, selling T-shirts he made featuring the Grateful Dead and anti-Nixon designs. He graduated from Kutztown Area High School in 1976. He studied commercial art from 1976 to 1978 at Pittsburgh's Ivy School of Professional Art, but eventually lost interest, inspired to focus on his own art after reading The Art Spirit (1923) by Robert Henri.

Haring had a maintenance job at the Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center and was able to explore the art of Jean Dubuffet, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Tobey. He was highly influenced around this time by a 1977 retrospective of Pierre Alechinsky's work and by a lecture that the sculptor Christo gave in 1978. From Alechinsky's 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. His first significant exhibition was in Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center in 1978.

Haring moved to the Lower East Side of New York in 1978 to study painting at the School of Visual Arts. He also worked as a busboy during this time at the nightclub Danceteria. While attending school he studied semiotics with Bill Beckley and experimented with video and performance art. Haring was also highly influenced in his art by author William Burroughs. In 1978, Haring wrote in his journal: "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."

Early work and breakthrough: 1980–1982

Haring first gained public attention for his subway drawings. Beginning in December 1980, he created white chalk images on black, unused advertising panels in New York City subway stations. He considered the subways to be his "laboratory," a place where he could experiment and create his artwork and saw the black advertisement paper as a free space and "the perfect place to draw". The Radiant Baby, a crawling infant emitting rays of light, became his most recognized symbol. He used it as his tag to sign his work while a subway artist. He developed a "vocabulary" with his images (such as barking dogs, flying saucers, and figures dancing) that became common in his iconography and his work became increasingly more recognizable.

The cut-up technique in the writings of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin inspired Haring's work with lettering and words. In 1980, he created headlines from word juxtaposition and attached hundreds to lamp-posts around Manhattan. These included phrases like "Reagan Slain by Hero Cop" and "Pope Killed for Freed Hostage". That same year, as part of his participating in The Times Square Show with one of his earliest public projects, Haring altered a banner advertisement above a subway entrance in Times Square that showed a female embracing a male's legs, blacking-out the first letter so that it essentially read "hardón" instead of "Chardón," a French clothing brand. In 1980, Haring also began organizing exhibitions at Club 57, which were filmed by his close friend, photographer Tseng Kwong Chi.

In February 1981, Haring had his first solo exhibition at Westbeth Painters Space in the West Village. While painting a frieze at P.S. 22 during the summer of 1981, Haring met graffiti artist Angel "LA II" Ortiz, who would become a key collaborator. Ortiz filled in Haring's drawings with squiggles and his graffiti tags "LA2" and "LA ROCK." Haring felt his "'signature' is a typically New York version of what I feel is as close as the Western World has gotten to a stylized form of writing similar to Eastern calligraphy." Their partnership marked an important shift from street-based tagging to institutional recognition. In November 1981, Hal Bromm Gallery in Tribeca presented the artist's first solo exhibition at a commercial gallery.

In January 1982, Haring was the first of twelve artists organized by Public Art Fund to display work on the computer-animated Spectacolor billboard in Times Square. That summer, Haring created his first major outdoor mural on the Houston Bowery Wall on the Lower East Side. In his paintings, he often used lines to show energy and movement. One of his works, Untitled (1982), depicts two figures with a radiant heart-love motif, which critics have interpreted as a bold nod to homosexual love and a significant cultural statement.

In 1982, Haring participated in documenta 7 in Kassel, where his works were exhibited alongside Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. That year, he was in several group exhibitions, including Fast at the Alexander Milliken Gallery in New York. In October 1982, he held a solo exhibition at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in SoHo, which was met with positive reviews. As ARTnews observed, "Haring's images are direct, witty and up-front. Beneath all his activity and the more recent publicity and high prices—Haring has an intelligent understanding of the nature of our culture."

Relationships

Haring had many casual male lovers, but he had two significant romantic relationships. Haring told his biographer John Gruen: "It's probably one of my major faults that I pursue physical love with such obsession. It was always the first and foremost aspect that I took care of. I always felt that intellectual stimulation and companionship could be supplied by other people."

Haring dated DJ Juan Dubose from 1981 to 1986. They met at the New St. Marks Baths in the East Village. Dubose moved in with Haring and his roommate Samantha McEwen in an apartment on Broome Street. Dubose would play at Haring's art openings and parties, and Haring worked to mixtapes made by him. By 1985, Haring began to travel more and lost interest in Dubose. "I was certainly unfaithful to Juan. … The fact is, I was bored with Juan's inability to do anything with himself. And I didn't like Juan's involvement with drugs, which was partly spurred by my rejection of him," he said. After Dubose died from AIDS in 1989, Haring helped his family arrange his funeral.

Haring dated Juan Rivera from 1986 to 1989. After leaving Dubose, Haring wanted to be a bachelor until he met Rivera at Paradise Garage in New York City. Rivera worked in construction as a carpenter and he was a limousine driver. Rivera moved into Haring's studio until he finally broke up with Dubose and then they moved into a new apartment together. Rivera was Haring's travel companion and he assisted him with the murals Crack is Wack (1986) in New York and Tower (1987) in Paris. When Haring told Rivera he had AIDS, he got tested and found out he had AIDS-related complex (ARC). Haring began to grow irritable and distanced himself from Rivera, spending more time with his friend Gil Vazquez. After learning that Haring had brought Vazquez to Europe instead of him, Rivera surprised them at the airport upon their return and broke up with Haring. Shortly before Haring died in 1990, he called Rivera and spent three days with him. Rivera later developed AIDS and died from ALS in 2011. The book Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails (2007) by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé details their relationship.

The Keith Haring Foundation

In 1989, Haring established the Keith Haring Foundation to provide funding and imagery to AIDS organizations and children's programs. The foundation's stated goal is to keep his wishes and expand his legacy by providing grants and funding to non-profit organizations that educate disadvantaged youths and inform the public about HIV and AIDS. It also shares his work and contains information about his life. The foundation also supports arts and educational institutions by funding exhibitions, educational programs, and publications. In 2010, the foundation partnered with the AIDS Service Center NYC to open the Keith Haring ASC Harlem Center to provide HIV peer education and access to care services in Harlem.

Social activism

Haring's work was closely tied to his commitment to social and political activism, which became a defining aspect of his career throughout the 1980s. He used his public visibility and distinctive graphic style to address issues including the crack epidemic, LGBTQ rights, and the growing HIV/AIDS crisis. He created works promoting literacy and youth engagement in collaboration with public schools and community organizations.

Haring was an outspoken critic of apartheid, most notably creating the poster Free South Africa (1985), which became widely reproduced symbols of protest.

He also produced works supporting nuclear disarmament. An example of this is a black and white striped flag that he said symbolized the danger of a nuclear apocalypse. In some of his art he drew connections between the end of the world and the AIDS virus. In a piece that he made with William Burroughs, he depicts the virus as demon-like creatures, the number 666, and a mushroom cloud.

As a gay artist who was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988, Haring became an important public advocate for AIDS awareness and education. In 1989, he established the Keith Haring Foundation to provide funding to AIDS organizations and children's programs, as well as to maintain and distribute his artwork.

During the final year of his life, he intensified his activism, participating in campaigns such as ACT UP initiatives and creating imagery used by advocacy groups to destigmatize the disease. His work Silence=Death, which mirrors the ACT UP poster and uses its motto, is almost universally agreed upon as a work of HIV/AIDS activism. In 1989, Haring designed T-shirts to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.

Three months after his death, Haring posthumously appeared in Rosa von Praunheim's documentary film Silence = Death (1990) about gay artists in New York City fighting for the rights of people with AIDS.