Keith Haring

His father was an engineer in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, who drew cartoons for his own amusement, and the son learned line from him and from Disney, Dr. Seuss, Charles Schulz and Looney Tunes. The family went to the United Church of Christ, and as a teenager he attached himself to the Jesus movement, then hitchhiked around the country selling T-shirts he had printed with Grateful Dead and anti-Nixon designs. He finished Kutztown Area High School in 1976 and enrolled at the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh to learn commercial art, which bored him. Reading Robert Henri's The Art Spirit turned him toward his own work. A Pittsburgh gallery gave him a show in 1978. That autumn he moved to New York.

In December 1980 he started drawing in white chalk on the black paper the transit authority pasted over unsold subway ad space — a crawling baby throwing off light, barking dogs, dancing figures — thousands of commuters a day and no admission charge. Hal Bromm gave him a solo show in November 1981. At Tony Shafrazi in SoHo in October 1982, more than a quarter of a million dollars of work sold in the first days. Vanity Fair put him on the cover in February 1984 and Newsweek ran him that October. He painted Grace Jones for Interview, designed a Sanitation Department anti-litter logo, and made more than 50 public murals between 1982 and 1989, many of them given away to hospitals, schools and playgrounds, including 300 metres of the Berlin Wall in 1986.

The Pop Shop opened in SoHo in April 1986, selling shirts and posters cheap, and the art world called it selling out. Haring answered that the shop was the subway by other means, an argument against the wall between high and low art. He stopped drawing in the subway once the shop was open — partly because he had got what he wanted, partly because people were stripping the drawings off the walls and reselling them. His Crack Is Wack mural on the FDR Drive got him arrested for vandalism, and while he was in a cell someone painted it over to read Crack Is It and the Parks Department covered the rest. He learned he had HIV in 1987 and AIDS in the autumn of 1988. He was 30.

He set up the Keith Haring Foundation in 1989 to fund AIDS organizations and children's programs and to hold the work. In his last year he made the Silence=Death image on the ACT UP motto and designed shirts for the 20th anniversary of Stonewall. He died at his apartment on LaGuardia Place on February 16, 1990, of AIDS-related complications, at 31. The memorial was held on May 4, which would have been his 32nd birthday, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where Mayor David Dinkins called his short life a mission of life and hope. The Whitney gave him a retrospective in 1997. In 2017 an untitled painting from 1982 sold at Sotheby's for 6.5 million dollars.

Keith Haring's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The subway drawings artwork
  White chalk on unsold black advertising panels, begun December 1980 1980
• Art in Transit book
  The subway drawings photographed by Tseng Kwong Chi 1984
• Pop Shop company
  A SoHo store selling his images cheap, and the argument of his life 1986
• Crack Is Wack artwork
  Painted on a handball wall off the FDR Drive, and it got him arrested 1986
• Berlin Wall mural artwork
  300 metres of interlocking figures in red, black and yellow 1986
• Todos Juntos Podemos Parar el SIDA artwork
  An AIDS mural painted in Barcelona a year before he died 1989

• 1976 aged ~18 Leaves Kutztown for commercial art school in Pittsburgh He lost interest and quit in 1978.
• 1978 aged ~20 Moves to New York for the School of Visual Arts He met Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat there.
• December 1980 aged 22 Begins the chalk drawings in the subway
• October 1982 aged 24 Sells a quarter of a million dollars of work in days at Tony Shafrazi
• April 1986 aged 27 Opens the Pop Shop and stops drawing in the subway
• October 23, 1986 aged 28 Paints 300 metres of the Berlin Wall
• 1987 aged ~29 Is diagnosed with HIV The AIDS diagnosis came in the autumn of 1988.
• 1989 aged ~31 Founds the Keith Haring Foundation
• February 16, 1990 aged 31 Dies at 31 in his Greenwich Village apartment

• Andy Warhol 1928–1987
  Pop art pioneer whose Campbell's soup cans and celebrity portraits defined contemporary American art. mentor
• Jean-Michel Basquiat 1960–1988
  Neo-expressionist painter who rose from graffiti artist to one of the most celebrated artists of the 1980s. friend, whose obituary Haring wrote
• Madonna b. 1958
  The Queen of Pop who reshaped the music industry and became a symbol of female empowerment and reinvention. downtown contemporary
• Larry Kramer 1935–2020
  Writer who co-founded Gay Men's Health Crisis and ACT UP — forcing faster federal response to AIDS. fought the same epidemic
• Roy Lichtenstein 1923–1997
  Pop artist whose comic-strip-inspired paintings became icons of 1960s American art. earlier raid on commercial imagery