Haring began to make a name for himself after moving to Manhattan’s Lower East Side from his hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania, in the late 1970s, a deeply artistic neighbourhood where he began to ply his trade as a subway graffiti artist. It was on these empty advertising spaces that he developed his iconic style, defined by brightly coloured, angular, characters, brought to life with semi-surreal settings and movements.
His work began to gain public traction in the early 1980s. He was featured on a Times Square billboard, began creating publicly commissioned murals, and commercialized his craft through the buttons and stickers which remain popular today.
As the 1980s progressed, Haring’s popularity snowballed. He began curating exhibitions across the United States alongside the likes of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, while his own art appeared in museums worldwide, on stamps, and in magazines. As his voice and reach grew louder, Haring poured more and more energy into his activism. An openly gay artist living in Ronald Reagan’s America, his work began to advocate for free love and safe sex among other sociopolitical issues, ranging from apartheid to the cocaine epidemic.
Haring took steps to combat the curators and traders who had inflated his prices so dramatically by opening the Pop Shop, a New York retail shop where prints and clothing featuring his work were sold at affordable prices. He also continued to paint in subway stations throughout his time in the public eye.
Haring’s greatest achievement, however, was likely the creation of the Keith Haring Foundation. Following his AIDs diagnosis, he created the foundation both to preserve his legacy and to support the political causes which defined his work, primarily AIDs research and children’s causes. By commercializing and improving the accessibility his work, Haring enabled his own charitable causes, combatting stigma around the HIV/AIDs crisis through education initiatives.
Speaking before he passed away in 1990, aged just 31, he was quoted saying that “All of the things that you make are a kind of quest for immortality. Because you’re making these things that you know have a different kind of life. They don’t depend on breathing, so they’ll last longer than any of us will. Which is sort of an interesting idea, that it’s sort of extending your life to some degree.”
The extension of Haring’s art beyond his life is plain to see. His art is just as prevalent in the modern day as it was in the New York subway of 35 years ago and remains a defining facet of LGBTQ+ art.
