Background

Keith Haring was born on May 4, 1958 in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the son of Allen Haring, an electricity plant foreman, and Joan Haring.

Education

After finishing high school in 1976, Haring attended the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Feeling stifled by the constraints of commercial art education, he left school after only two semesters in 1978. During the period from 1979 till 1980, Keith studied at School of Visual Arts in New York.

Career

Keith Haring began his career as an artist in the 1980s. In 1982 he served as a teacher at Fort Greene Day Care Center in Brooklyn, New York. In 1983 Haring travelled to Switzerland to serve as the artist-in-residence at that year’s Montreux Jazz Festival. Outside installations of his work during the early 1980s caused him to travel further, as he created large-scale murals at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on a building in Tokyo, and for the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, and several other installations around the globe.

In 1985, at the first annual Children’s World Fair in Asphalt Green Park, New York, Haring hosted a painting workshop and gave away free coloring books. He designed the cover illustration and centerfold for an issue of Scholastic News, a popular elementary school publication distributed nationwide. The painter also was involved in activities for young people at Dobbs Ferry, New York Children’s Village, which sponsored a "Keith Haring Day" in 1985 during which the artist, in characteristic fashion, distributed drawings, buttons and other tokens to the many young people in attendance.

In 1986, without the use of preliminary sketches or notes, Haring painted a three-hundred-fifty-foot-long mural on West Germany’s Berlin Wall, laying a background in the colors of the German flags with a chain of human figures interwoven upon its surface. The same year, in 1986, the artist founded the Pop Shop in New York, and in 1988 he established the Pop Shop Tokyo in Tokyo, Japan.

By the mid-1980s, Haring’s easily recognizable graphics had become well-known even beyond Manhattan. They now appeared on Swatch watches, T-shirts and in Absolut vodka ads.

Despite criticism from certain members of the art communities, the graffiti-like nature of Haring’s oil and acrylic paintings, the high-profile exposure provided by the artist’s many public works and his commercial successes only enhanced his appeal. He would hold more than forty one-man shows during the second half of the 1980s. Haring’s works would also be acquired for permanent collections of several museums, including the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, the Whitney in New York and the Beaubourg at the Pompidou Center in Paris. Mural installations were undertaken for the Schneider Children’s Hospital of New Hyde Park, New York, the Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and Grace Hospital, in Atlanta, Georgia, among many others. Haring’s works became increasingly refined as the artist sought to meld his street style to the technicalities of "fine art". Although his work for gallery showings and private clients made increasing demands on Haring’s time during the late 1980s - his period of greatest popularity - he continued to create art for the public, on the walls of hospitals, in schoolyards, and in his own Pop Shop.

Some of Haring’s later projects included sets for ballets, murals for New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, a "Subway Show" at Lehman College in the Bronx, sculptures exhibited by gallery owner Leo Castelli, and a mural of the Ten Commandments for the Musee d’Art Contemporain de Bourdeaux. Proof that money was not a motivating factor - despite the fact that his artworks had by now earned him a small fortune - Haring continued to initiate art projects with innercity children, including a mural for the Boys Club of New York, and created posters and did public service announcements for the New York Public Library Association’s 1988 literacy campaign. He also contributed to Live AID in 1985 and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Among his final works was the mural titled Once Upon a Time, which he contributed to the ACT UP - Stop the Church campaign held in New York near the end of 1989, a protest against the homophobic religious fever sweeping the nation in the wake of the AIDS scare.

Achievements

• The artist was best known as the high-spirited and creative talent behind a vast body of work consisting of cartoon-like images that he set down with deft pen and brush-strokes, often spontaneously. Noted as a muralist and graffiti artist, much of Haring’s work could almost be considered performance art due to its creation in front of audiences of passersby. His graphic images transcended race, culture and geography, joining the "high" art of the exclusive galleries with the mass art of the common people.
  
  Keith Haring's works appeared at numerous galleries, including Westbeth Gallery, Annina Nosei Gallery, Michael Kohn Gallery and many others. His paintings also were exhibited in Tokyo, Paris, Milan, Turin, Basel, Munich and Amsterdam.
  
  Approximately in 1987, Haring was made Chevalier de l’Ordre du Merite Culturel by Princess Caroline of Monaco.
  
  The artist was also the founder of The Keith Haring Foundation.
  
  In 2017, one of Keith Haring’s Untitled artworks was purchased at Sotheby's New York 'Contemporary Art Evening Auction' for $6,537,500.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • Art in Transit: Subway Drawings 1984
  • Nina's Book of Little Things 1995
  • Keith Haring Journals 1996

• painting

  • Free South Africa

    1985

  • Andy Mouse

    1986

  • Untitled

  • Installation Shafrazi Gallery

    1982

  • Untitled

  • Lucky Strike

    1987

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Montreux

    1983

  • Untitled

  • Pop Shop 1

    1987

  • Portrait of Macho Camacho

    1985

  • Toledo

    1988

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Paris Mural

  • Red-Yellow-Blue No.15

    1987

  • Boys Club Mural

    1987

  • The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

    1984

  • Pop Shop III

    1989

  • Labyrinth

    1989

  • Brazil

    1989

  • Chocolate Buddha 1

    1989

  • Best Buddies

    1987

  • Piglet Goes Shopping

    1989

  • Statue of Liberty

    1986

  • Untitled

  • Untitled (Dance)

    1987

  • Moses and the Burning Bush

    1985

  • Ignorance = Fear

    1989

  • Flowers IV

    1990

  • Monkey Puzzle

    1988

  • Radiant Baby

    1990

  • Crack Down

    1986

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Crack Is Wack

    1986

  • Andy Mouse

    1986

  • Untitled

  • Lucky Strike

    1987

  • Untitled

  • Fight Aids Worldwide

    1990

  • Anti-Nuclear Rally

    1982

  • Keith and Julia

    1986

  • Apocalypse No. 9

Religion

Although Keith Haring was raised in a Protestant household, he encountered and voluntarily joined the 1970s "Jesus Movement" in his youth. Its followers were known as the 'Jesus People", or more commonly "Jesus Freaks". The movement was evangelical and their message was to spread the word of Christ. It was predominately anti-church and anti-fundamentalist, and was also characterized by their anti-materialism and extreme compassion for the poor.

Keith Haring used many Christian and Biblical motifs in his grafitti-like art. Some art critics believe, that Haring was criticizing how religion takes hostage of one's life.

Julia Gruen, Haring's studio assistant, observed that religion was "omnipresent" in his work.

Politics

As his fame grew, Haring remained dedicated to grassroots activism, and this commitment is aptly on view. For an anti-nuke rally in 1982, he produced 20,000 copies of a poster he freely handed out. Also fierce was his commitment to anti-racism, illustrated powerfully in a 1985 poster, Free South Africa, highlighting a black-silhouetted man with a white noose around his neck trampling a smaller white figure.

Views

Quotations: "Whatever you do, the only secret is to believe in it and satisfy yourself. Don't do it for anyone else."

"Children know something that most people have forgotten."

"Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic."

"My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can."

Personality

Keith Haring was gay. In 1988, he was diagnosed with AIDS. In later period of his life, the artist played active role in raising awareness about the deadly diseases like AIDS.

Connections

Father:

Allen Haring

Mother:

Joan Haring

Sister:

Key Haring

Sister:

Karen Haring

Sister:

Kristen Haring

Friend:

Kenny Scharf

Friend:

Jean-Michel Basquiat

mentor:

Andy Warhol

References

• Keith Haring: The Boy Who Just Kept Drawing Iconic pop artist Keith Haring comes to life for young readers in this picture book biography lovingly written by his sister.
  2017
• Keith Haring (Rizzoli Classics) Closely based on Haring’s own concept for the monograph he wanted to publish before his untimely death, this volume represents more than a decade of research and contains a wealth of unpublished photographic and written material including drawings, studio photographs, and journal entries.
  2014
• Keith Haring: The Authorized Biography A biography of the pop-art phenomenon discusses his work, homosexuality, and his coming to terms with his illness.
  1992
• Keith Haring - Le petit prince de la rue