APPAREL WALL
Keith Haring
The Apparel Wall comes back to honor one of the brightest creative talents of the past century, Keith Haring. The Pennsylvania born painter, writer, visual artist is commonly recognised as one of the most prominent virtuosos with his innovative, groundbreaking work in the street-art scene and beyond. His talent is yet today considered as one of the most recognisable and appreciated ever and his definite style became one of the most cross-over unmistakable traits ever conceived. His incredibly rich, decade-long activity left an indelible mark in the world of modern art.
Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) was an American artist whose pop art emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture of the 1980s.
His animated imagery has "become a widely recognized visual language". Much of his work includes sexual allusions that turned into social activism by using the images to advocate for safe sex and AIDS awareness. In addition to solo gallery exhibitions, he participated in renowned national and international group shows such as documenta in Kassel, the Whitney Biennial in New York, the São Paulo Biennial, and the Venice Biennale. The Whitney Museum held a retrospective of his art in 1997.
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The Universe of in Keith Haring
“The Universe of Keith Haring,” a documentary by the filmmaker Christina Clausen, is a loving if routine primer on this bright young man from Kutztown, Pa., who moved to New York to study art and paint the town red. His legacy is resurrected through colorful archival footage and remembered by friends and admirers like the artists Kenny Scharf and Yoko Ono, the gallery owners Jeffrey Deitch and Tony Shafrazi and the choreographer Bill T. Jones.
Haring's popularity grew from his spontaneous drawings in New York City subways—chalk outlines of figures, dogs, and other stylized images on blank black advertising spaces. After gaining public recognition, he created colorful larger scale murals, many commissioned.
He produced more than 50 public artworks between 1982 and 1989, many of them created voluntarily for hospitals, day care centers and schools. In 1986, he opened the Pop Shop as an extension of his work. His later work often conveyed political and societal themes—anti-crack, anti-apartheid, safe sex, homosexuality and AIDS—through his own iconography.
Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Haring is raised in nearby Kutztown, Pennsylvania. Keith has three younger sisters: Kay, Karen and Kristen. He attends Kutztown Elementary. Young Haring has a paper route. His family attends the United Church of God.
Father Allen Haring works as a manufacturing supervisor at AT&T, and amateur cartoonist. Mother Joan is a housewife. Haring develops 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. Teenage Haring gets involved with the Jesus Movement, an Evangelical Christian movement, whose members were called Jesus people, or Jesus freaks. Jesus people had a strong belief in miracles, signs and wonders, faith, healing, prayer, The Bible, and powerful works of the Holy Spirit. Many Jesus people lived in communes. Haring is, for a short time, a faux hippie; experiments with drugs, hitchhikes across America selling Grateful Dead and anti-Nixon t-shirts that he makes.
Haring graduates high school and enrolls in the Ivy School of Professional Art, Pittsburgh, a commercial arts school. Haring soon realizes he has little interest in being a commercial graphic artist and after two semesters, drops out. He continues to study and draw on his own.
Haring had a maintenance job at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts 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 one-man exhibition was in Pittsburgh at the Center for the Arts in 1978.
Haring moves to New York and enrolls in the School of Visual Arts (SVA). He makes friends with fellow SVA student Kenny Scharf. In downtown NYC, Keith gets involved in the thriving alternative art community outside the gallery and museum system, in the streets, the subways and clubs like Club 57, Mudd Club and CBGB’s.
He meets and becomes friends with musicians, performance artists and graffiti artists like, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lee Quinones, LA II, Fab Five Freddie and Madonna. He also makes friends with Andy Warhol. 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.
In December 2007, an area of the American Textile Building in the TriBeCa neighborhood of New York City was discovered to have a Haring painting from 1979.
'The Radiant Baby'
Haring first received public attention with his graffiti art in subways, where he created white chalk drawings on black, unused advertisement backboards in the 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 with emitting rays of light, became his most recognized symbol. He used it as his tag to sign his work while a subway artist. Symbols and images (such as barking dogs, flying saucers, and large hearts) became common in his work and iconography. As a result, Haring's works spread quickly and he became exceedingly more recognizable.
Keith Haring paints a mural at the Art Gallery of NSW (29/2/1984)
He thus gave Melbourne a bravura performance akin to that described just a few days later, during Haring’s painting of another mural in the foyer of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, by Sydney art critic Terence Maloon:
Haring was observed on an hydraulic platform working away from left to right, without any preparatory drawing. He never came down to ground or stepped back to appraise the work in progress. … He has evidently developed a sixth sense through long practice as a graffitist, and has an instinctive understanding of scale; spacing and variation
The Message
In 2013, Maripol directed The Message, a 52 min. documentary about the artist Keith Haring, for his retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris.
His friend Maripol, a French artist, stylist and film-makerwas a privileged witness to the cultural effervescence in New York at the time and evokes the commitment and causes Haring championed.
Directed by famed designer, Madonna stylist and Haring confidante Maripol, The Message goes pretty deep into both the artist and the city and times he’ll forever be identified with: New York City, circa the 1980s. The focus, as the title indicates, is upon the “struggles that animated” Keith Haring’s work, his activism – in a word, his “message.”
"Keith Haring was not a great artist. He might not even have been a very good one. But he was the right person in the right place at the right time, and he had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of just the right energy: a radiant, joyful enthusiasm that he shared with unflagging vitality first on the streets of New York and then on the world stage. Like Andy Warhol, whom he revered and later befriended, Haring was the visual artist as social phenomenon, connecting the gay scene to hip-hop, Madonna to museum culture, the democratic street to the rarefied art world. If his story is only marginal to the history of art, it looms large in the cultural history of our time, which Haring (who died of AIDS in 1990, at 31) saw far too little of."
Keith Haring Mural Auctioned for $945,000 - A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the mural, rediscovered after 30 years, will return to Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital, where the mural was originally housed.
