40 years ago, a 25-year old Keith Haring came to the Walker Art Center for his only residency with the museum. Haring’s time in the Twin Cities was spent conducting a youth residency, painting a temporary mural, and designing a poster for a youth-focused festival called ArtFest. Four decades later, Haring’s legacy is celebrated with all its vibrant colors, open-hearted commentary, assured mark-making and generous spirit, summed up in the exhibition’s title: “Keith Haring: Art is for Everybody.”
Organized by The Broad in Los Angeles, and curated by the museum’s curator Sarah Loyer, the Minneapolis version of the traveling exhibition is coordinated by Siri Engberg, the Walker’s senior curator and director of visual arts, with curatorial assistant Brandon Eng.
Originally from Reading, Pennsylvania, Haring had moved to New York City in 1978 to attend the School of Visual Arts. He started to gain attention in the early 1980s for his ephemeral chalk drawings on unused billboards in subway stations.
“You don’t have to know anything about art to appreciate it,” Haring said in an interview featured in a CBS Evening News segment in 1982. “There aren’t any hidden secrets or things you are supposed to understand.” The segment includes footage of Haring getting arrested for vandalism, followed by a packed exhibition in SOHO with art-goers shelling out a quarter of a million dollars within the first few days of the show.
That exhibition, at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, was Haring’s “breakout moment,” according to Engber, when the artist “caught the attention of both the media and the art world.”
“As he prepared for the show, Haring really resisted the high art technique of making paintings on canvas,” Engber said at a media event last week. Instead, the paintings are made on hardware store tarps attached to the wall with grommets.
At Tony Shafrazi, Haring also made drawings and sculptures made from dollar store markers, and there are works painted on found enamel panels. “The entire exhibition was put together with this spirit of DIY,” Engber says. “It was an opening like no other. I heard it went into the wee hours of the morning and was absolutely a convergence of many cultures and artistic groups in New York.”
When I visited “Keith Haring: Art is For Everybody” at the Walker last week for the media preview, I loved the video documentation especially. The archival footage gave a sense of Haring’s confident approach and whimsical style. It turns out each of the artist’s works were completed in a single day, and you can see in the videos just how deliberate he was at creating his images.
“After he made a mark, he would seamlessly move to the next mark, never looking back like a stream of consciousness,” Engber says.
The exhibition also includes photographs and ephemera from New York’s nightclub scene. One room is completely lined with flyers that give a taste of what it must have been like to be immersed in that world, with lineups for shows including the likes of The Cure and Laurie Anderson. Haring would curate shows at Club 57 and hung out with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, performer and model Grace Jones, and Madonna.
There’s also video and ephemera taken from Haring’s collaboration with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company “Secret Pastures.” It premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1984, and came to the Ordway a year later in a co-presentation with the Walker.
In 1988, following Basquiat’s death, Haring painted a heartbreaking work called “A Pile of Crowns for Jean-Michel Basquiat,” made of his friend’s signature Black crown images stacked up in a pyramid, framed in a deep red triangle. He also pays tribute to Andy Warhol in “Andy Mouse” (1985), juxtaposing the image of his mentor with the Walt Disney icon.
Beyond the direct mentions of Warhol, the older artist’s presence can be felt throughout the show. Gil Vazquez, executive director of the Keith Haring Foundation, tells me that Keith often noted his admiration for Warhol. “Andy gave not only Keith, but that whole generation of 80s artists permission to be ‘successful,’ to not fall for the starving artists trope,” Vazquez tells me.
At the same time, Haring was in many ways more direct in bringing his sexuality into his art-making than Warhol had been. There’s a delightful erotic quality especially in Haring’s early works. “Keith was very much more open and celebratory where Warhol was coded,” Engber tells me, “but he also really appreciated the way Warhol had a real embrace of getting the word out there in a democratic way.”
Haring lived a short life, dying at age 31 in 1990. He’s part of a generation of artists the world lost to the AIDS epidemic, and the exhibition highlights Haring’s activism to bring awareness to the AIDS crisis and other causes— apartheid being one and nuclear disarmament being another. There’s also a stunning painting he made in 1985 for Live Aid, a benefit concert raising funds for famine relief in Ethiopia. Painted in bright yellow, with the outlines of two abstracted, cartoonish hands holding a heart-framed earth in the center, the work bears the streamlined narrative of many of his works, where bold, simple choices garner emotion.
He also fiercely drew attention to his own battle with AIDS, like one large painting that shows a dangerous red creature with twisted eyes and a long snout poking the center of a yellow-painted figure, the two creatures entwined.
Besides the chronological mapping of Haring’s career, the exhibition includes a room dedicated to Haring’s time in the Twin Cities.
While in Minnesota, Haring traveled to Alice Smith Elementary School, in Hopkins, where he collaborated with the students to make set pieces for a dance theater work by Jacques d’Amboise. On his last day, he created a mural on a wall that connected the Walker Art Center and The Guthrie Theater, which at that time, sat adjacent to the museum. The mural’s creation was meant to inaugurate the Walker’s new education facilities, and remained on view until December, 1985. Haring also designed a poster for the Walker’s “ArtFest” that year, a 2-week festival geared toward young people.
As part of the Walker’s Keith Haring programming, it’s reviving ArtFest for three days starting with a kickoff on Thursday May 30, a “Teen Takeover” on Friday, May 31, and a “Free First Saturday” event on June 1.
You can also see the exhibition for free at this week’s Free First Saturday, with free admission 10 a.m. to 5 pm and activities from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. More information here.
Sheila Regan
Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at [email protected].