Keith Haring: activism through public art and unapologetic Sexuality. How a gay artist of the 1980s solidfied his role in queer history.

Keith Haring was a visual artist of the 1980’s whose emblematic work impacted people of all backgrounds. As a queer icon, someone who was unashamed of his sexuality in a time when the AIDS epidemic was decimating the queer community, Keith’s legacy has endured as much for his artistic ability as for his attention on social justice.

Each member of One Direction has shown an appreciation for Keith in some way, be that a shirt featuring his art or a print hanging in their home or studio. Given this connection to the band and to queer history, this article will cover Keith’s life and his lasting contributions.

Early Life

Born on May 4, 1958 in Reading, Pennsylvania. His parents, Joan and Allen Haring, also had three daughters (Kay, Karen, and Kristen) after Keith, making him the eldest of four. They were a typical, conservative Midwest family living in Kutztown. Keith’s father was an engineer, but also an avid amateur cartoonist. He was the one who encouraged Keith’s art from a very young age.

There’s not much to share about Keith’s childhood, however, certain influences impacted him when he was young and continued to show in his work throughout his life. Keith grew up during the Space Age, an era of scientific exploration, but also incredible uncertainty. He lived during the Cold War and was heavily impacted by the possibility of nuclear disaster. Keith was deeply religious as a teenager, calling himself a “Jesus Freak” and while he was not religious as an adult, the well known “radiant baby” or “radiant child” that became his signature was sometimes (though not always) a Christ child.

Partly to inspire his art, and largely to rebel as a form of escapism, Keith was a regular user of multiple recreational drugs. He started in his teens, and tapered off a bit in adulthood, but he was active in the club scene which often included casual drug use. Keith didn’t see great value in the altered state for his art, so after early attempts at combining the two, he generally did not rely on substances for inspiration.

While living in Pennsylvania as a young adult, Keith studied commercial art. Originally, this was the direction he thought his career would follow. But after seeing the work of Robert Henri’s Art Spirit Keith was inspired to focus more on creative works rather than commercial ones. His first exhibit was at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts when he was only nineteen years old, and while the work he displayed at the time was very different from his signature style, it still held a resemblance to the very specific vibe that Keith was known for. It wasn’t until Keith moved to New York that both his career and his life changed significantly.

Moving To New York

In 1978, Keith moved to New York City to enrol in the School of Visual Arts. “For me, 1978 was a new beginning.” Keith meant this in many ways. Yes, his work was going to change and he was going to become internationally famous, but it was also his first time living as an out gay man. He did not come out to his conservative parents until after his move to the city.

Keith loved living in New York because it allowed him freedom from his conservative upbringing. “I’m glad I’m different. I’m proud to be gay.” He wrote often in his personal journals, stories of going to the clubs and meeting potential partners, both for sex and for work. For a while during the 1980s, the club scene and the art scene of NYC were inseparable. Keith spent most of his evenings between Paradise Garage, Club 57, and International Stud, and so did most of the other singers, painters, sculptors, actors, and musicians of the era. It was through that scene that he met Warhol and Basquiat and Madonna, who in turn introduced him to others like Grace Jones and Vivienne Westwood. It was Keith’s queerness as much as his talent that brought him into the art scene at that very specific point in time, just at the beginning of the 1980’s.

Referring to Christopher Street as “Gay Disneyland”, Keith thrived in the new environment. He’d never been more creatively or personally fulfilled and he’d found his home. As someone who held Walt Disney in incredibly high regard, and considered him one of the most important artists of the century (along with Warhol and Picasso), Keith could not have paid the city a higher compliment.

In his rented apartment on First Avenue, Keith covered the walls in tiny penis drawings. The street art he began to dabble in wasn’t yet as inclusive of sex as it would eventually become, but that influence was there from early in Keith’s work. “I spent 90% of my time being totally obsessed with sex and that became the subject of my work.”

But Keith’s work was inspired by more than sex. He took inspiration from what he found when he moved to New York. Keith became obsessed with graffiti, truly admiring the talent and the knowledge that it came from the public, rather than the institution. He loved the street performers, the dancers, the beat boxers, the constant movement of the city. And as someone who always had music playing as he was working, in some ways, he was able to visualise sound.

Early Work – The Subway Drawings

Keith did not become famous or celebrated from booking a gallery (though he would in later years). His rapid rise to success was almost an antithesis to what was expected of an artist in the late 20th century. He wasn’t interested in the establishment or in fame. Keith was interested in art and his deep rooted belief that art can change the world.

What started as a spur of the moment decision became one of Keith’s most enduring legacies. Taking the subway through NYC, Keith noticed that unsold advertisement spots were covered over with black paper, and where most saw nothing, Keith saw a canvas. He went outside the subway, bought some simple white chalk, returned to the blank paper, and got to work.

The true appeal of this manner of artwork was that it was ephemeral. He used chalk rather than paint or anything more permanent, something with which he could work quickly and that could be erased by a clumsy pedestrian or a damp environment. Keith wasn’t interested in it lasting or becoming important. He created the art for its own sake, working in the moment, adapting and improvising each drawing on the spot. Keith would make multiple drawings in the subway per day, sometimes dozens, each only taking 1-2 minutes of his time to create. The residents of New York became familiar with his style: the dancing figures and the radiant baby and the barking dog creature.

The city literally became his canvas. Keith wanted his art to be accessible to everyone, and it was. There was no entrance fee. There was no one waiting there to explain his art via diminutive plaque. There was no bidding at auctions that sold the persona as much as the piece. It was just there for anyone to experience on their way across the city. Keith noted, “This was the first time I realised how many people could enjoy art if they were given the chance. These were not the people I saw in the museums or in the galleries but a cross-section of humanity that cut across all boundaries.”

Despite using only chalk, Keith was arrested for vandalism multiple times. However, he was never jailed. When evaluating these years of Keith’s work and how it led to his success, it’s important to remember that Keith was white, he was not poor, and that other artists were regularly arrested for essentially the same thing he became known for. Their style was different, but the reason those other artists faced consequences was that they were poor, Black, or both. The graffiti that so inspired Keith was primarily a medium used by poor, young, Black artists, and the city had a decades long campaign against them. So while Keith earned fame and an audience from his work, it can’t be forgotten that if he had been Black or unhoused or poor, he likely would’ve been jailed and his legacy would not exist.

During his years as a subway artist, Keith continued his life in the club scene. His influences were wide ranging, incorporating all that was around him with art that he personally connected with. Keith’s signature style was heavily influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs, Picasso, Warhol, and Disney. And there would be no Keith Haring without Basquiat. They were friends but they were also contemporaries, navigating a world that neither of them was readily accepted into: Keith due to his disenfranchisement with the establishment, and Basquiat for his race.

Keith kept up with the Subway drawings for about half a decade, making it an almost daily practice and generating thousands of original pieces. “They come out fast, but I mean, it’s a fast world.” Keith wanted his art to reflect the way he experienced life: fleeting and community focused and seeking the freedom of childhood.

Fame and Success

By the time he was 25, Keith was famous for his chalk drawings. His work was being covered by newspapers. He was invited to galleries and hired to paint public murals. The magazines and cable news followed him like a celebrity. Part of the reason his art caught on so quickly was that his figures, human or otherwise, lacked any recognisable features relating to race, gender, or age, meaning that people of any demographic could relate to his work.

Generally speaking, Keith did not enjoy the fame. He enjoyed much of the work that came with it, but not the fame itself. His close friend, Andy Warhol, was the one who taught him the importance of having a persona. Warhol, who created a portrait of Keith and his partner in 1983, was a guide and a mentor to Haring when it came to managing the fame and how to balance that with focusing on the art.

Keith learned fast. “You have to not only be a good painter, but you also have to be able to deal with being photographed, and also, you become a model and a performer and all these other things. Sometimes I enjoy it, sometimes I don’t, but it doesn’t matter. You still have to do it.” He knew that once he’d gathered the audience and the attention, it was best to use it, even if he didn’t intend to find the spotlight in this way.

With his newfound fame after a few years of subway drawings (and one small exhibit in 1981) came a wealth of exciting, large scale projects. In 1983, Keith worked with Grace Jones for an exhibition where he used her body as a human canvas. The two would collaborate several times over the course of the decade.

In 1986, Keith created a massive mural on the Berlin Wall. He used the colours of the German flag as a symbol of unity between East and West Germany. The mural was destroyed in 1989 because the wall was knocked down, but even before then, many other artists and visitors had started drawing over and around Keith’s mural, creating an entirely new work from the base that Keith created.

Also in 1986, Keith worked with a thousand at-risk youth to create a Statue of Liberty mural for the statue’s centennial celebration. He spent a lot of his time working with kids of all ages and backgrounds. Keith created murals for hospitals and schools and anywhere he thought his art could bring something to the space, both through the art itself and his work there. Because he was so well known by the middle of the decade, Keith was aware that just showing up somewhere and spending a bit of time on a drawing would bring attention to a space or a cause by proximity.

Keith’s social life was also thriving. He was close friends with Madonna; When invited to her wedding, Keith brought Andy Warhol as his plus one. He still frequented his favourite clubs, spent time with his celebrity friends, and shared a life with his partner, Juan.

Despite the fame and monetary success he now had, Keith genuinely enjoyed giving his work away for free. He did so intentionally, handing out buttons or posters on the streets or offering to create a quick artwork for anyone who stopped him for an autograph. There’s so many original Keith Haring works that his foundation had to shutter their authentication efforts due to an overwhelming volume. Keith wanted everyone to have access to his art, and in almost every conceivable way, he succeeded.

Relationship With the Art Establishment

Keith’s growing fame and success was certainly not as a result of his collaboration or acceptance by the art establishment. He was popular with the people, not with the critics, but Keith was fine with this. He saw galleries and museums as intrinsically hierarchical and he had no love for the official institutions.

The relationship between Keith and the art houses wasn’t helped by the fact that they would refer to Keith’s work as “fast food,” something quick and flashy and without substance. Meanwhile, Keith had an unflinching belief that art was essential in making a better world, and a central focus of his work was a combination of social issues, from nuclear disarmament to the AIDS crisis.

Keith was aware of where he stood with the art establishment and his ability to succeed through that avenue. “My support network is not made up of museums and curators, but of real people. And that’s good because everything I’ve ever tried to do was cut through all that bullshit anyway.”

While his work was constantly dismissed, Keith wasn’t shy in his public dislike for the establishment, or the people who operated in their elitist spaces. “Art should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.” Keith didn’t want his art to become a source or symptom of what he most despised in the world. His art was quick and honest and public facing, not hidden away and hoarded for monetary gain.

One of his most famous works, the “Crack is Wack” mural, is an excellent example of this. Keith was not commissioned for this mural (though it still exists today). Instead, he was almost arrested for it. The mural was a very straightforward acknowledgement of the drug use he saw affecting his community and the city in general. While he was a user of other drugs, he saw cocaine as a particular problem, and he used his art to bring attention to that. And, in an almost direct middle finger to the establishment, the work was heavily influenced by a Coca-Cola campaign of the time: “Coke is lit.” He used what had been bought and paid for, and shifted it into something he saw as useful.

Another reason that Keith preferred his work to remain out of the galleries was that he felt it would change his process and his purpose. “If it is not regarded as sacred and valuable, then I can paint without inhibition, and experience the interaction of lines and shapes. I can paint spontaneously without worrying if it looks good; and I can let my movement and my instant reaction/response control the piece, control my energy.” For Keith, his process was equally as important as the product. It was all one and the same, and changing one would ruin the other.

Pop Shop

With his steadily increasing fame, and with his artwork becoming more valuable to others, by the mid-1980s, Keith had to stop his subway art. People were stealing the drawings and auctioning them off for significant amounts of money, which was the exact opposite of what he wanted.

In addition to his actual work being sold off without his consent, there were also forgeries starting to be sold, often in places he visited every day. People would copy his style and sell it to tourists or to anyone who wanted a piece of his artwork for themselves. Partly to combat these forgeries, and partly to have a way to sell his art to those who wanted to support him financially, Keith opened the Pop Shop in 1986. It was his solution to cutting the art establishment out of the equation, while also maintaining the integrity of his brand.

The art world was scandalised by Keith’s decision to open the Pop Shop. It was seen as cheap, or selling out. They imagined his priority was money, but Keith was very clear that it was the opposite. When he was selling his art on $10 t-shirts and cheap posters, it wasn’t for financial gain. “For the past five or six years, the rewards I’ve gotten are disproportionate to what I deserve. I make a lot more money than I should make, so it’s a little bit of guilt, of wanting to give it back.”

If it had been about the money, Keith could have sold himself out years ago. He was constantly in talks with large corporations to do advertising work for them or to run commercials. But Keith wanted his art to exist for its own sake and to remain accessible to the public, both things he could accomplish by opening the Pop Shop and selling his work himself.

This was something that just wasn’t done by serious artists. According to the establishment, serious artists sold their works in galleries and auctions for thousands or millions of dollars, and it was all handled by brokers and kept apart from the majority of people. “Serious art” would be kept in museums and private collections, along with stolen artefacts and culturally significant plundered objects, and Keith had no interest in being part of that. He’d rather deal with the disdain of the art houses and focus on what he could control: creating his art and deciding on its distribution.

The Pop Shop remained open until 2005, almost two decades, and for a majority of that time, the funds went to the Keith Haring foundation to assist in AIDS related research and other causes that Keith was passionate about.

AIDS Diagnosis

Living in New York City as a proud gay man, Keith was not only aware of the likelihood he would contract HIV, but that it would probably kill him. He always thought he would die young, likely in his twenties, mentioning it in his journal or even in passing conversation. From an early age, he felt like his time was going to be short, and he always lived as if this was the case. And it’s not that Keith wanted to die young or that he wanted AIDS to eventually kill him, but he expected this to be the case and he was at peace with it.

“I’m quite aware of the chance that I have or will have AIDS. My friends are dropping like flies, and I know that it is only divine intervention that has kept me alive this long. I don’t know if I have five months or five years, but I know my days are numbered.” This motivated Keith to work more than ever, to accomplish as much as possible every single day and to share as much of his art as he was capable of producing.

Keith tested positive for HIV (human innumo-deficienty virus) in 1987 after experiencing laboured breathing and finding a purple splotch on his leg. He was 29. In the fall of 1988 he was diagnosed with AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), meaning the viral infection had progressed to the final stages (for more about HIV and AIDS, see the No Stunts article about World AIDS Day linked in the sources).

A year after his diagnosis, Keith set up the Keith Haring Foundation to provide funding and support to AIDS research and to AIDS related charities, especially those who provided education on the disease.

Keith’s interview with Rolling Stone magazine was when he shared his diagnosis with the public. At the time, admitting his status as an HIV positive individual was considered career ending, but Keith didn’t care. “I’m not really scared of AIDS. Not for myself. I’m scared of having to watch more people die in front of me again.”

Surprisingly, despite his conservative upbringing, Keith had the support and love of his parents and family both before diagnosis and at the end of his life. “My parents have been so amazing about the whole thing, but in their own way – knowing but not saying anything. I never tried to hide it from them, and they never asked me about it.” His parents would invite his partner along when Keith visited home in Pennsylvania, and when they came to New York, they would mingle with his gay, trans, and generally queer friends. Keith was glad to have their support, but he was also proud and bold in his identity and would have been publicly out regardless.

During his interview with Rolling Stone, Keith said, “Unfortunately, death is a fact of life. I don’t think it’s happened to me any more unfairly than to anyone else…I’ve lost a lot of people, but I haven’t lost everybody. I didn’t lose my parents or my family. But it’s been an incredible education, facing death, facing it the way that I’ve had to face it at this early age…A lot of the people that I’ve lost have been lost because of AIDS – to have it happen that way, in a way which can many times be very slow and very horrible and painful, you know, it’s been really hard. It’s toughened me. It’s made me, in a way, more respectful of life and more appreciative of life than I ever, ever could have been.”

Final Works

Keith’s HIV (and eventual AIDS) diagnosis certainly shaped his last few years of work, though he never expected a different outcome. Instead, he used his time and his art to advocate for gay rights, to educate on safe sex, and to stay true to what he had always believed: that art had the ability to change the world and that it should be accessible to everyone.

There was no real treatment for HIV at the time of Keith’s diagnosis. He knew his time was short, though he didn’t know just how short it would be. As Keith got progressively more sick and he began to deal with his mortality, his art started to include daggers, nails, and impaled figures. And, additionally, his work started to feature sexuality and sexual acts as part of his objective to raise awareness about the disease. His “safe sex” poster featured two figures performing handjobs on each other, and he worked with the “silence=death” campaign to add art to their message.

The increased, explicit sexuality of his work was completely unapologetic. “The subject matter of many of the drawings I was doing became completely phallic. Partly, really consciously as a way of sort of asserting my sexuality and forcing people to deal with it.” Keith was already dying. He didn’t care what people thought of his sex life. He wanted to focus on what he saw as most important, and he did.

Keith spent a majority of his last two years travelling the world and working on as many large scale projects as possible. In 1989 he visited Chicago and worked with thousands of local high school students to create a massive mural in Grant Park. The kids adored him. One student said, “A lot of artists had these big egos, but he was just like…one of us. We hung out, we kicked it, I think we might’ve had some Burger King.” For most, Keith working in their communities was their first exposure to a living artist. For some, Keith’s visit was the reason they themselves became artists.

Political activism drove a significant portion of Keith’s work, especially towards the end of his life. In some works, he draws connections between the end of the world and the AIDS epidemic, using stereotypical apocalyptic imagery like demons, mushroom clouds, and 666. Keith was very anti-nuclear power and avidly pro-disarmament. He was deeply affected by the nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island, close to where he lived at the time. To him, all of his political activism was interconnected. His disenfranchisement with the establishment wasn’t only with the art establishment, but with all the institutions that ruled his life, the same institutions that failed him and his community.

This complete commitment to his craft and to its use was central to Keith’s personal identity and philosophy. “I think I was born an artist. I have a responsibility to live up to that. 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.”

Death

At the age of just 31, Keith Haring died on February 16, 1990 from AIDS related complications. He had developed Kaposi’s sarcoma and experienced renal failure.

Ketih’s body was cremated and his ashes were scattered in a field in Pennsylvania near his home town. A memorial service for Keith was held on May 4th, 1990 at the Cathedral of St. John in New York City, with over 1000 people in attendance.

Two of Keith’s closest friends, Warhol and Basquiat, preceded him in death by less than a year. Keith wrote Basquat’s obituary in Vogue and created a memorial artwork in his honour that featured a pile of black crowns (Basquiat’s signature) in the shape of a triangle.

Deeply affected by the deaths of his friends and contemporaries, Keith mentioned both of them in his Rolling Stone interview, and how they weren’t the only losses he had to process near the end of his life. “To lose Andy and Jean-Michel…the weirder thing was that it had happened right after I had lost someone else. When Andy passed away, I had just lost a friend of mine who was sort of like a guardian angel for me, Bobby Breslau. He was like my conscience, my Jiminy Cricket…that was like pulling the rug out from under me. It was like being a little bird thrown out of a nest. You’ve got to do it on your own now. And you’ve got to do it in a way that’s going to live up to what he would have expected. Within a month, Andy passed away…A week before I was to go (on vacation) my ex-lover, Juan Dubose, who had been sick for a while, died…Within the week, my friend Yves Arman gets killed in a car accident. I was the godfather of his child. Four or five people died within a year and a half. The main people.”

Despite this tremendous amount of grief and loss, Keith worked until the day he died. He was offered a collaboration with Disney, a lifelong dream, and it was only his death that got in the way. He was creating art until he couldn’t anymore. To his own end, Keith was steadfast in his commitment to sharing what he could with the world and doing so on his own terms.

Posthumously, Keith featured in the film Silence=Death about the AIDS epidemic. It was filmed shortly before he died and was released on the same day as his memorial service: May 4th, 1990. It would have been Keith’s 32nd birthday.

Legacy

Keith produced more than 50 public artworks between 1982-1989, a majority of them for children’s hospitals, schools, or parks. In addition, he created an estimated 10,000 art pieces total, though that number is likely higher due to his habit of giving them away before they could be remembered.

One of Haring’s frequent collaborators, Angel Ortiz, received the proper credit and monetary compensation for their collaborative works while Keith was alive, but after his death, the art establishment shut Angel out completely in its attempt to take over Keith’s legacy. They could not control Keith or his work during his lifetime, but in death, there was a scramble to profit off his name. Keith loved Angel, often referring to him as his little brother, and the Keith Haring Foundation has spent years trying to reincorporate his contribution to Keith’s work and success.

Today, Keith’s paintings sell for millions of dollars, despite his intention for his work to remain public rather than be lost to private collections. Keith was public minded and wanted his works to bring light to social issues, rather than become a spectacle to his memory. His every intention was for his works to be ephemeral and transient, leaving as soon as they arrived. Which isn’t to say he didn’t want a legacy of any kind, just that he would never have wanted his pieces auctioned off to the highest bidder. Sometimes he would intentionally choose a mural location based on its inability to be removed and sold; he would rather the entire wall or building be destroyed along with his art than for it to be sold at auction

In 2014, he was one of the original honorees at the San Francisco Rainbow Honor Walk. In 2019, Keith was one of fifty Americans honoured at the Stonewall National Monument. More than three decades after his death, Keith’s work continues to resonate and inspire, especially in the queer community. He was included in the infamous AIDS memorial quilt thanks to his mother and aunt who worked together to create a square of the radiant baby in Keith’s memory.

Keith’s estate has collaborated with dozens of brands, from Adidas to Coach to Disney. This certainly seems more in line with what Keith intended with the Pop Shop than the pieces that have sold for millions. The Keith Haring Foundation continues his work of art outreach and AIDS education.

During his lifetime, Keith’s art was dismissed by the art world as frivolous or meaningless, able to be popular because it was nothing, according to the critics. But it’s hard to look at Keith’s memorial to his friend Basquiat or to his infamous Unfinished Painting from 1989 and not understand the depth of his work. Keith loved cartoons and bright colours and recognizable shapes, and he used all of these as his tool for social commentary. He was involved in anti-Apartheid work, education around HIV and AIDS, and nuclear disarmament activism. Keith’s art was how he engaged with these topics and brought others into the conversation.

Because Keith achieved such fame during his lifetime, there’s a large number of videos where Keith can be heard and seen, exactly as he was.Keith also left journals and there are several interviews that he granted and are still available for viewing. One of the quotes that encapsulates listening to Keith is also from the Rolling Stone article: “Keith talks like he paints. It comes out in a line, a spontaneous, smooth line.”

Keith’s legacy is one of activism, accessibility, and political action through art. He’s a queer icon, an important artist who reflected a specific period of time, but he was also just a man. He was Keith, and he was gay. Keith was hard working, passionate, and determined. A brother, a son, a partner, a collaborator, a friend, an inspiration, an artist.